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Title: As a YC W10 startup, we were lucky to have dinner with Zuckerberg and I asked him afterwards why he chose that blue for Facebook... Cause he's color blind. Not a majestic response about how color influences mood, buying habits, etc.<p>He used a color that was personally best for him. And a lot of the top brands in the world now, started in garages & workshops... where the branding research consisted of a couple rounds "what if we..." before a name was born and then a logo & design.<p>My favorite example of this is Mercedes. The brand now stands for luxury cultivates a significant vibe... but why did the founder call it that? Simply, he named the company after his daughter... and now people name their daughters after the car!<p>A lot of YC companies get greif for their names (most.ly the ly.ly ones) but how much does a name / brand have on the actual product being successful.<p>I think it can have an influence, but at the end of the day... the quality of what you build will determine its success.<p>With that in mind, my fellow hackers & founders... from a guy that runs a website about color... Be more adventurous with your colors. Have some fun.
Upvote: | 172 |
Title: A dead simple way to estimate the annual revenue of any company.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I suddenly realized that I'm practicing 'programming tricks' in real life all the time.<p>Specifically, the divide and conquer strategy for problem solving and building larger things out of smaller sub assemblies, but the more I think about the more I see that plenty of the stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis has it's roots in programming (or at least that's where I picked it up).<p>For instance, assume nothing, trust but verify, be strict in what you send but forgiving in what you receive and so on.<p>Those all have real-life equivalents for me.<p>Professional deformation or useful trait? Do you have it too ? In what way ?
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: A couple years ago I created a Twitter-related widget in javascript that people could embed on their websites. I did it for fun, just to see what would happen.<p>Now, the widget is installed on thousands of websites and gets over 5 million pageviews (from over 1 million visitors) per month. It is not monetized at all, and it is just leaking bandwidth from my server. I can't afford to just let this run out of my pocket for much longer.<p>So, how could I make some money with this? The widget is part of a larger Twitter-related site (which gets a tiny bit of ad revenue), but most of the traffic/cost comes through the widget.<p>Any ideas would be most welcome. (posted from throwaway account)
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: http://www.canyoucode.com<p>CanYouCode is a freelancing website, which is different in the following ways:<p>1. Minimum rate of $35/hr - likely more. (you can't find good freelancers for anything less.)<p>2. Profiles are reviewed before being allowed to bid - We verify LinkedIn profiles, Open Source contributions, Blog, proper web standards etc.<p>Basically the idea is to target developers who can't survive on the $10-20/hr at Elance or oDesk. Currently we are accepting signups only from the US and Europe.<p>We would like inputs on:
1. It is interesting?
2. How to get traction?
3. Should we apply for YC Winter 2011?<p>Thank you.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I'd like to get some early feedback about my new startup, ShiningPanda: Hosted Continuous Integration for Python.<p>http://www.shiningpanda.com<p>The goal is to provide a dead simple web service so that you can build, test and deploy your various Python projects, without having to care about setting up servers, databases, build tools, reporting, etc. This includes of course web projects based on django, web.py, werkzeug, etc., but also the associated functional tests based on Selenium.<p>We are planning to enter into private beta soon, so if you would like to participate, please let us know. If you feel like telling us about what your dream integration service would be like, let us know too, we really want to hear about what our (future) users want!<p>Thanks in advance!
Alexis
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Write your tests in NodeJS, run them with Selenium RC, or on Saucelabs OnDemand service in all your favorite OS/Browser combo's.<p>Very, awesome.
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: We are building a web application targeted towards educational institutions. We have recently started the sales process and have begun with making cold calls/visits to potential customers. Will appreciate it if you can share your experience and learnings as you went out to get the first paying customer
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Short version: I've been asked to compile a document that will go to various people at MS, including Steve Ballmer (before anyone asks, no I'm not giving you his or anyone elses contact details).<p>As such, what would you guys like to see from Microsoft in the future? Suggestions can cover anything from IE9 to Windows 8, your thoughts on 7 (desktop or mobile), Xbox, Zune... Also, thoughts on competitors and their movements would be welcomed too.<p>Please note that this isn't just a feature request list, so anything to do with the strategic direction of MS and/or any of its divisions would be great.<p>Fire away!
Upvote: | 164 |
Title: It started with this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/d7ntl/ive_had_a_vision_and_i_cant_shake_it_colbert/<p>And they donated more than $240k to Donors Choose on Stephen Colbert's behalf to convince them: http://www.colbertrally.com/<p>Jon and Stephen's announcements:<p>http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/<p>http://www.keepfearalive.com/<p>Amazing.
Upvote: | 121 |
Title: What is your folder structure for your files?<p>There isn't much info on this, but it is a pretty central component of using a computer.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I had an itch to scratch around making it easy to share sets of images with other designers and thought that I could use the new drag and drop file support to solve it. DropMocks was the result after a quick weekend of hacking.<p>It's built on an App Engine backend, and the uploader relies on the PushState and the File API from HTML5, so it only currently works in Chrome 6 and Firefox 4*; supporting other browsers would be the first post-hack step if I were to take it further.<p>An example gallery can be found here: http://www.dropmocks.com/mSER
Upvote: | 241 |
Title: Thinking about being a single founder? (Add generic disclaimer here) Well let me outline what my experience has been as a sole creator/manager of my own project. The short of it is you'll do lots of different jobs. Stuff you never thought you'd have to do or know about, you eventually will. Its fun, don't get me wrong, but at times taxing, especially if you start to get some traction.<p>So here is the kind of things you'll need to do as a single founder. For one, it helps to be a developer. Why, because without a product/service/website what else do you have to do. So first you develop. You build new features, you analyze, you build some more, you get some feedback, the cycle continues. People start signing up and using your product.<p>First, if you're lucky enough to have received some feedback from interested users pat yourself on the back for this one. If you develop something and no one's interested you don't have much else to do anyway so you're done. Next, as you develop some more you realize you need to start getting the word out about your service since everyone is giving you good feedback and they're telling their friends about you. But maybe you're not just getting the numbers you'd like to see yet. You'll most likely buy into the notion (as I did) that growth = success (and maybe that is right). You never know, your site could be the next best thing (you at least tell yourself this!).<p>So now empowered with users and interest you become a Marketer Guru. You'll want to learn just about everything you can about SEO (takes about an hour), then do as much as humanly possible to revamp your entire site to make sure you rank well at Google. You revamp alt tags, page descriptions, position keywords, create 'interesting' context....blah, blah, etc. You try Google Ads for a while, maybe Facebook, send bloggers emails, try to get some press, maybe even do some hardcore banner advertising. So now your traffic starts to grow even more, GREAT! Now you can relax, right? Well not so fast. Now you realize that the VPS just can't handle the new load you ingeniously placed on it, so you move to a dedicated server (thumbs up). You get that up and breathing, then you realize that you've got over 30Gigs of client files to transfer, a https cert to transfer, an SMTP server to configure, installing other useful tools, etc. So you stay up all night to configure the new server and pray that you'll get all your files transferred intact.<p>Not to mention you've got support emails filling in your inbox, you're getting automated exceptions in your email telling you that you're site is having connection issues with your SQL server and your hosting company can't tell you why, you have to figure out why your HELO is being rejected (ahem email), insure DNS is correctly setup, find out why half of Europe can't access your site but the rest of the world can. It goes on and on. I'm sure I forgot the half of it already. We have a product (magazine) as part of our site/service so optionally throw in creating a product.<p>So now we've got a few jobs for you: Senior Web Developer, Database Admin, Marketer, Publisher (in my case), System Admin, Help Desk ... and on and on and you start to get the picture. Oh and by the way you might have a day job too! So you'll be working just about every night from about 9-1am and probably half your weekends too. Let me tell you that lack of sleep catches up with you after a while, but I'm still amazed by how durable the human body is! And also, If you have a family, which I do, you'll need a very understanding wife.<p>This is more of a footnote but you could me suffering from a disease or mutation which allows your brain to solve lots of problems or generate a million ideas so you see opportunities everywhere which you'd love to start working on...but crap, you've got an inbox full support emails.<p>Good luck if you decide to go this route, but my opinion is get somebody to help you do something. One person can't do it all forever. Luckily I have a good support system which can also help. Knowing a few people here and there with different expertise can be of great value.<p>If you're interested, I am the creator of fotoblur.com and Fotoblur Magazine.
Upvote: | 87 |
Title: Vancouver Hackers: I will be hosting a 100% free startup hackathon/startup weekend-style event October 8th through 10th at The Network Hub in downtown Vancouver.<p>Other events want to charge $75 per person to attend but we think money adds a big barrier for many hackers (especially those in college/university). If you're interested and free that weekend, I've setup a simple form to gauge interest and see if we can fill up the space.<p>We will be working out beer and caffeine sponsors but everyone will be responsible for their own food/snacks. The location is right on the edge of Gastown, endless options for places to eat and drink. We're also above a 24 hour Waves Coffee and right across the street from a Blenz Coffee.<p>Please apply if you can come out for the whole weekend. You can pick up a new project or work on existing ones in a great environment.<p>I've had a quick chat with Colin Percival (cperciva) and he will be coming out on Saturday night to give a talk.<p>Event page: http://verev.com/vancouver-hackathon/
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: HN, I'm in desperate need of some help. I've been applying to many hotel API's and affiliate programs, and have been able to get into most of their affiliate sections, but the API is a whole other story. They're locked down like maximum security prisons.<p>It's been weeks with lack of responses, and rejections citing "Incomplete Site", which is quite difficult, because the site I'm building requires access to an API to finish it. It's completely reliant.<p>Does anyone know any open hotel API's which don't take weeks to get into? I needed to have this project launched last week.<p>Would really appreciate any help, or suggestions.<p>Lachy
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: My laptop was stolen from the trunk of my car yesterday.<p>Today, I received this email:<p>---
So as much as i want to rationalize my actions, I understand buying stolen property is still stealing. I am the one who unfortunately bought your laptop from someone who likely stole it. I will eventually pay for my bad karma.<p>Berating me for my actions is useless.<p>I am deleting everything off of the laptop.<p>Is there anything that you want.<p>I am offering to back up to 160 gigs to another hard drive. There is only about 240 gigs worth of information.<p>I see that you have backed up most everything using time machine. If there is anything smaller like 4, 8, or 10 gigs worth I can do that faster to DVDs or flash drives.<p>I would have to buy another hard drive to get you the 160 gigs. Which i would if you need the info.<p>Again apologies for not having the integrity to turn down the offer to buy your laptop
----<p>how did he get my email?
how does he know i backed up to time machine?
what would you do?
Upvote: | 99 |
Title: If a user doesn't like an update, he/she might say so and give it a very low rating to try to kill your sales until the issue is addressed.<p>Something seems wrong about this. A single user can have way too much power over sales. And there is a total lack of respect for the developer.<p>Perhaps Apple should allow users to go back to previous versions if they don't like an update.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: A lot of people seem to boost the web navigation experience through browser extensions/plugins. So, what do you use, and why do you use it?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: My father is a custom's officer. My mom's a manager in a bank. Government employees. Middle-class.<p>Dad focused on his mutual funds, mom on her promotions. And both, on everything in between. We now own three houses and close to a millions-worth.<p>I wasn't taught to be egotistic, brash and adventurous. I was taught to be hard-working, loyal and obedient.<p>I was told to maximize my intellectual, professional and social value for a company. Not for a client (the former offered better security and were easier to deal with anyways)<p>Math and Chemistry, not Psychology and Political Science.<p>Fixed deposits, not stocks.<p>I started a local website development business recently. My goal? Have something to show at interviews.<p>I want to know why this is so wrong today.<p>I want to know why we fixate so much on the millionaire's presentation about some bread-crumb concept like,“Love your job”. Was anyone was not aware of that?<p>What about an opinion by the 90k-salaried .NET developer. The one who probably couldn't be happier that he payed off his 3-bedroom condo last week. Or am I wrong here?<p>Why do we continue to preach the greatness, the undisputed manifesto of startups and entrepreneurship in general.<p>Why are there half-a-million blog posts by some 28-year old on how having your own startup will result in you losing weight and gaining muscle, eating better, dating supermodels with PhDs while the startup simultaneously mows the lawn and cooks breakfast every morning for you.<p>Why, even when we know that 9 in 10 of us are doomed.<p>I want to know: Why the hype?
Upvote: | 154 |
Title: .apk: http://gluegadget.com/hndroid/HNdroid.apk<p>Screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amir_mohammad/sets/72157624870942817/
Upvote: | 176 |
Title: How did you become interested in computers/technology?<p>For some of us, it was very early, possibly so early that it may be difficult to remember. For others, including myself, it was a more recent development.<p>I didn't become interested in computers until high school, when at that time I was so computer illiterate it was almost comical. In fact, it was a specific point in time, I remember, that my older brother made fun of me because I was constantly asking for his help. I decided to make a change and begin teaching myself about these amazing machines and all the power that they possess. After learning the general basics, I quickly picked up a book on C programming and worked my way through it. I now continue to personally develop my knowledge every day, using tools such as iTunesU and MIT OpenCourseWare to supplement my education.<p>I am now an undergraduate student studying computer science and enjoying every minute of it. So much so, that I wish I had decided to study electrical and/or computer engineering/physics so that I could have a more robust understanding of how these machines work at the hardware level.<p>The point of my question is to discover others' personal history regarding their venture into the constantly changing world of technology.<p>Please share.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: This is for all the self employed hackers. Are you saving for retirement?<p>We don't have company 401(k) options, so what are you doing to save/invest?<p>I opened a Roth-IRA and just learned about Solo 401(k)s and SEP-IRAs. I think I'll keep contributing to the Roth, but look into other options as well.<p>Where are you putting your money?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: After the kids get to bed, I'm either burned out for the day or doing something else that must be done (laundry, etc.).<p>How do you make/find time to spend the time you want to in order to help with the family, run your part-time (or full-time) business into the evening (etc.), and still be able to have some downtime each day? How do you get focused?
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: Hi HN, posting anonymously.<p>I've just been offered a job at Google in Mountain View as a software engineer. I'm 35 and I have about 11 years of experience.<p>I'm from England and have a no-name degree. I would be sponsored for a visa.<p>So I have a couple of questions:<p>- Is $110k a good base salary for the Bay area?<p>- How does 200 GSUs stack up?<p>- Would you take the job? If so, why? If not, why not?<p>I work in the Thames valley currently and don't know how my standard of living will change.<p>I am a C++ programmer who hasn't previously worked for a "name" company and my degree is from a no name poly in the UK.<p>I must admit I'm tempted to go work on a scale I've never seen before. But Google seems a little more like a large company than a startup these days.<p>Note: of course some of the details have changed to obfuscate the source.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: When you’re shopping for stolen credit and debit cards online, there are so many choices these days.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I was offered a Senior RoR dev position at a 50-ppl funded and revenue-generating bay area company last week. I accepted, signed, and was excited to join this company. Subsequently I gave my two-week notice at my current job (not in the bay area). They have started my exit process here.<p>This afternoon I got a call from the HR that they are retracting my offer as "circumstances have changed and they are eliminating the position". I am literally shocked as I have a perfectly good, well-paying job at a Fortune 500 company where I've worked for 5+ yrs that I resigned from to join this small company.<p>What is my recourse in this situation? I was told by the Engineering Manager in this company that I got two thumbs up from all the interviewers and they were looking forward to me joining. He even sent me tech documents to go over a couple days ago.<p>I don't know what to do. Not only does this affect my employment situation but also my immigration situation. Not having a job impacts my ability to stay in the US.<p>I can't go back to my current team now as it will not only look ridiculous but my commitment will be questioned as well.<p>Please advise. I'm just really distressed and upset right now.
Upvote: | 271 |
Title: I'm noticing lately many quality articles don't get any votes in the new links. What happened? Is HN grown so much that people submit many articles? Did you noticed the same problem?
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: I guess hackers like to just build stuff. What have you built other than sotware? Maybe a crib for your new born child, maybe a house, maybe a bike etc...
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: I'm currently working as a contractor software developer, however all my jobs are for other IT companies who deliver work for the end clients.<p>I'd like to be in the position of delivering solutions directly to clients for two reasons - first, more lucrative, second the freedom to choose the technical solution rather than what the contracting company decides I should choose.<p>Could any contractors out there tell me how they got their first "real" clients ? Was it just knowing the right people, or are there steps you can take to market yourself outside the IT world ?
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I got sick of my friends complaining about not finishing small projects. Some of them claimed they were too busy to finish writing that novel they've been thinking about for the last few years (They told me this when we were wasting time in a bar, no less). One friend told me that he wouldn't be able to start his own company because he ran out of time.<p>After hearing all of these people bitch and complain, I finally snapped and told them to stop talking and just "Finish Shit"!<p>Something strange then began to happen. People actually started to get motivated, and were <i>finishing their shit</i>! Books were being worked on, papers filled to form LLCs.<p>This exclamation turned into a mini web app idea for me. What if people could submit things they were procrastinating on, and get yelled at by complete strangers until they were motivated enough to do it?<p>I built a rough version of the the app at finishshit.com. To submit something you need help with, just message @finishshit on Twitter. If you're not a procrastinator, check out the site anyways. It's very therapeutic to yell at procrastinators that deserve/want it.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Hi, I've been thinking about doing an HN related project and was wondering if the topic of crawling HN has been covered before. A search of "Ask PG" didn't bring up anything relevant nor did the guidelines and FAQ links. I'm also unaware of any api availability. There seems to be new HN side projects popping up every few weeks or so. How are you getting your HN data?<p>Obviously the basic rules apply, aka. don't hammer my server, duh. Assuming sequential article id's currently clocking in at ~1721000+ It would take a fare amount of time to slurp down HN even at 1k pages/day. Maybe look into pulling down the google cache. Eh, I dunno. Don't want to get any of my ip addrs banned or worse (hehe). Just looking for some guidance... Thanks in advance.
Upvote: | 71 |
Title: Today's psychoanalysis of patio11 was uncalled for and the member who wrote it should be banned. There's no demand for that sort of thing here. If a member wants help from this community they'll ask; interventions are offensive.<p>But, more importantly, patio11 is not who we think he is, and I am not who you think I am.<p>The jgrahamc you know through my blog and through my comments here is a persona. It is a facet of my life, and a window through which I have allowed you to see. Most of my life is hidden to this community, deliberately. You do not need to see it. I came to share a part of me that this community, and perhaps only this community, can truly understand. For me this is a sacred place where an important part of my personality and self is allowed to blossom.<p>Let's keep HN sacred.<p>We all need private spaces where we can be with others who are like us, and express things that others would not understand or appreciate. For me, HN is that type of space even though it's public. To keep it sacred means certain limits must be respected and today's article was beyond the pale.
Upvote: | 186 |
Title: Spolsky vs. DHH, feat. Zuck
by Alonso Piranha<p>DHH's verses should be performed in the style of Eminem in "My Name Is," while Joel should sound like Jay-Z in "Hard Knock Life." Zuck should imitate Twista in "Overnight Celebrity." Based on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720050<p><pre><code> Joel:
I'm calling you out, Hansson
You think you're so smart, and you think you're so handsome
But I'm holding your rep for ransom
Stop fronting like you're the Wall Street Journal
Your thoughts are as childish as some grafitti on a urinal
Facebook is an empire you can't begin to comprehend
And your contrarian attitude is just a passing trend
DHH:
Don't blame me 'cause you never had any friends
You're just a nerdy teddy bear
Joel:
Well you look about 13 with that spiked-up hair
DHH:
Out of any group of hackers, I'm the slickest
Plus I'm the only one here who understands business
You think the price of one share is a meaningful statement?
Then I've got a bridge in San Fran
Could be yours with a small down payment
Seriously dog, are you buying Zuck's crap?
I guess you really are one hell of a sap
Joel:
You don't know the meaning of valuation
SVN is just so much mental masturbation
You wouldn't last a minute on the NYSE
Those sharks would consume you mercilessly
You wanna learn, hit up the Chi-town mercantile
Until then try being quiet for a while
But I bet you couldn't shut up if you tried
'Cause then you'd have to face the emptiness inside
Admit it, you're a second-rate entrepreneur
And it drives your crazy, that's why you spit this manure
Facebook is a cash cow, and it ain't just me who said it
They're worth 33 billion, ain't you follow Reddit?
Zuck's hard like a rhyme by Biggie, and you're weak like the radio edit
DHH:
If Facebook's making bank like MSFT
Then why you think they need that Series E?
Their worth is illusory
If you can't see that, you're a looser, G
Go ahead, invest in Facebook, be a sucker
But between you and me
Madoff ain't got nothing on Zucker
We saw this all before in 1999
But you don't have the vision to look back in time
What can we learn from the past? Here's my Google Answer
Stack Overflow's a bust, like a Libra with a Cancer
Joel:
First of all, Facebook didn't do Series E
And furthermore, I can see Lady Liberty
From my office on the 25th floor
Your office overlooks a Goodwill store
I was in the Israeli paratroopers
While you sat in your skivvies watching bloopers
You stay up all night tinkering with Rails
While I'm up all night getting mad tail
I'm a mature gentleman who understands how to scope stocks
You're just an angry little kid with an Internet soapbox
Rails is just a toy, not ready for prime-time
Why else you think Twitter be down 'bout half the time?
You wanna talk about Getting Real?
I heard Twitter had to Rework their whole stack, you feel?
DHH:
I'm such a genius coder, they should give me an Oscar
You're still slinging ASP like an impostor
I made Ruby into a celebrity
While you still wallow in Microsoft's complexity
I'm the godfather of Ruby on Rails
But you're straight up goofy like Soupy Sales
I done wrote all the rules
And I singlehandedly invented the new school
But you're just an old man grappling with old tools
You know what they say about some money and a fool?
They'll soon be separated
And when that happens to you, I'll be elated
Joel on Software is way overrated
Stack Overflow's the most uninventive site ever created
It won't be but a year before your bank account's deflated
When you come crying to me for a room and some food
I'll throw you out like any homeless dude
And you'll be sorry you ever hated
Zuck:
Hold it
Get these two clowns off the stage
I straight run this town 'cause I'm the sage
Became a billionaire at the youngest age
Got all your social lives in my cage
Now you're in too deep, yeah you're up Fog's Creek
And your 37 Signals can't compete
With the 33 billions in my keep
You can call me a creep
'Cause I put your business in the street
And your Facebook account just won't delete
But that won't make me weep
'Cause my earnings so steep
I don't lose no sleep
May the notion of privacy rest in peace
Stop frontin' like some moguls, you should just retire
Bow down and praise the glory of Zuck's empire</code></pre>
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Everyone at YC speaks of the mantra "Build something people want" but what if our customers don't know they want it?<p>That's part of the issue that my team and I are struggling with. We've built some really good online software that could really help small businesses. However, the industry that we're in is absolutely non tech savvy and use very traditional methods to do what our software could automate.<p>We've been struggling with selling our product because many people refuse to change and don't want to learn new technologies. How do we overcome this in a very traditional industry? It's too late to switch markets.<p>Is it just a matter of good sales and marketing?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: For what it's worth, seems to me like nobody is reading the new page much any more.<p>Used to be I'd submit an article and get 60-150 reads as the article dropped off the new page. Today I submitted an article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1723576 and got only a couple of dozen.<p>Now perhaps you guys have managed to figure out that all of my articles suck all of the time, but even then you'd think with 10x the traffic it would still translate into more initial readers from a year ago.<p>I'm not trying to complain that nobody upvoted my article! Hope it doesn't sound that way. I'm much more interested in the lack of drive-by readers now as opposed to a year ago and what that means for the site.<p>If you'd like to hear me complain, happy to oblige. Meanwhile the front page has gossip stories about how a lot of Angels are actually assholes, some famous guy quit Oracle, another guy rags on .NET, Uncle Bob is a great person, and more Google/Apple fluff, along with the more usual HN material.<p>Just seems kind of strange. Don't know about you, but all this industry gossip, fanboy-bait, and the lack of user-generated content drives down the quality for me in a big way. Combine that with a lack of readers from the new page, and it seems like there is a feedback loop setting up. It's not that HN is turning into reddit, but it seems like the mechanism of HN itself has changed significantly.
Upvote: | 123 |
Title: HN,<p>A startup that I am part of failed. Prereq: USA, C-Corp in Delaware. We have $6k in server fees to Rackspace and $3k in debt with our lawyer. We also have a huge amount of credit card fraud that went through our credit card processing account/merchant account (like $8k), which is going to be an ongoing issue for the next year+ and may end up in me and my SSN being blacklisted from Visa and Mastercard.<p>I used to be able to cover this kind of failure, but over the past few months, I've sunk tons of my money into this company and completely depleted my checking and savings accounts.<p>The account goes into collections in the first week of October (which means my credit will be destroyed). I will be leaving the startup after I sort everything out.<p>I need a way to make this $6k in about 12 days. My savings is shot. I have some consulting (WordPress, PHP, Rails) money coming in, but it's only $1k and might not even be on time. My co-founder owns a majority of the company but he's traveling so he's a bit unavailable.<p>This seems to be the "low" of that rollercoaster we call serial entrepreneurship. Thank you for your help, Hacker News.<p>EDIT: I'd just like to say that I'm using a throwaway because I'm pretty well known on HN, which makes this pretty interesting. I usually read these kinds of Ask HN posts and think "ouch"—funny to be on the other side.<p>EDIT: I'll respond soon, HN is giving me the "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." thing. I'm reading all your comments—they are not going unnoticed. And thank you.
Upvote: | 180 |
Title: A potential client recently asked me this question and I'm interested in the community's opinions on this.<p>Also, this is not really a yes/no question; it's a discussion prompt. :)
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: For the first time since graduating, I've recently had the possibility to escape the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT departments, and had a look at what life and the world have become in the past 10 or so years. And I've discovered that the main focus of pretty much all of my life fails to excite me anymore - my honeymoon with computers and IT seems to be over. And I'm left asking myself: What now?<p>Let me explain where I'm coming from: Probably like most of you, I've been exposed to computers at an early age. My first conscious memory of using a computer is playing the original Pong on a black and white TV at a friends house when I was 6 or 7. Since then I've been hooked. When my father got an Amstrad CPC when I was 10 or so I could spend hours on end playing on it, playing with it, reading up on how it worked, later on copying code listings from magazines and finally deciding to learn to program it myself. There were to many things and concepts to explore, learn and figure out. From there I moved on to PCs, fiddling with hardware, learning about IRQs, IO Ports, memory management. Moving on the programming side from BASIC to Pascal, C and Assembler.<p>And then discovering Linux and Open Source in the mid 90s. Ever more concepts to explore: How does networking work, what is this crazy web thing and what can be done with it, getting into DNS and mail servers. And at the same time being exposed to new programming languages and paradigms seemingly at every turn: Prolog, Java, Scheme/Lisp, Perl and PHP. And on the system side it seemed like there was a new minor revolution every other week, introducing ever more possibilities: A new kernel, a new samba version, the advent of P2P. And on the cultural side of open source there were lots of competent people freely sharing their ideas, teaching, showing, comparing notes. It was a high energy environment, constantly pushing forward.<p>My main source of fascination came from the exploring of new concepts, and understanding how everything worked and fit together. I stuck to one topic until I understood it, consequently losing interest and moving on to the next bit to explore (pardon the pun).<p>I graduated shortly after 9/11 and the dot com bubble bursting. Just narrowly avoiding personal bankrupcy on my first stunt as a freelancer which I ventured into with my youthful optimism/arrogance, I consciously started shutting out everything distracting me from financial recovery and keeping my respective job.<p>Welcome to the treadmill.<p>Now, nearly 10 years later I'm having my first real look around in a long time and I'm not terribly happy about what I'm seeing. The Open Source revolution seems to be over; very few new things have happened there in these past years. It's all about maturity and stability now, no longer aggressively pushing forward.<p>And it seems that the children of the revolution turned the gold to chrome, scrambling to squeeze a buck out of anything a buck can be squeezed out of. Instead of the free sharing of ideas I grew up with, I'm encountering more and more the attitude of a guarded sharing of general topics, but the real knowledge and experience seems to be held back because it has to be regarded as a personal asset that might be used to turn a profit somewhere.<p>Todays big topics leave me pretty much unenthused. As a not particularly social person I fail to be fascinated by the social web. Mobile internet will be the big thing for the next few years, but for whatever reason I fail to be fascinated by gadgets that are the offspring of cell phones and my pentium from way back, reliving the DOS shareware scene through a centralized distributor. Server side scaling is all about variations on few well known themes: Add another cache/key-value store/nosql store, insert another abstraction layer, data and workload decentralization.<p>So I'm in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. And they all seem familiar. Is this how deep the rabbit hole goes? Did I really reach the end? Or did I just fall out of the loop at some point in the past few years and need a pointer in the right direction? Did I just get old and not notice it until now?<p>I'm sure some of you have experienced something similar. How did you move on? Did you manage to rekindle the flame somehow? What are your suggestions as to where I should go to from here and to ideally find new worlds to discover and explore?
Upvote: | 120 |
Title: Everybody uses Google, Bing, DDG, or some other search engine. But are the search giants as ubiquitous as they seem? I think there's a great value to individual sites' search features, mainly because they go beyond the grasp of GoogleBot.<p>There was a post recently about Google's main competition being Bing. I think that's entirely untrue. I think their main competition is the long-tail of search that they simply don't have the dataset to compete against.<p>Here are sites that I can recall using the search feature, and it actually being useful:<p><pre><code> - Wikipedia (half the time I use Google, though)
- SearchYC
- Urban Dictionary
- BTJunkie
- StackOverflow
- Delicious
- Twitter
- YouTube
- eBay
</code></pre>
What sites do you find have a useful search feature?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: I own a domain which ends in "bay", but has no content on it nor does it looks or sounds like "eBay".<p>I received the message below from "Edith, eBay legal department" via Domains By Proxy. Unfortunately Edith does not have the class to include a family name or contact details.<p>I guess eBay can hide behind some statist law, but I was wondering how I should react, if at all.<p>P.S. Other than being a female, common and familiar name, are there other reasons why Joe the Lawyer would want to send an email as "Edith"?<p>---------------------------
We have noted your registration through the Internet registry in your country of theplayersbay.com, a domain name that is confusingly similar to the famous eBay name and trademark.<p>The coined term "eBay" is one of the most famous brands on the Internet. eBay owns exclusive trademark rights to the eBay trademark in many countries worldwide, including the United States, Canada, The United Kingdom, the European Union and elsewhere internationally, including related common law rights. Accordingly, eBay enjoys broad trademark rights in its name.<p>Arbitrary use of the word BAY in a domain is problematic if the connected website is used in association with a business making use of eBay or operating in the same sphere of business as eBay.<p>Please review the following links for further information regarding eBay trademarks:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/tm.html
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/trademark.html<p>We are concerned that use of your domain name may infringe and/or dilute the famous eBay trademark. Infringement occurs when a third party’s use of a company’s trademark (or a confusingly similar variation thereof) is likely to confuse consumers as to the affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement of the third party’s services. Trademark dilution occurs when a third party’s use of a variation of a company’s trademark is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the company’s famous trademark. In this case, your use of “BAY” in your domain name, especially if used for an e-commerce web site, is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the famous eBay brand. “eBay” is an arbitrary and fanciful trademark; neither “eBay” nor “bay” describe online auctions, online trading, or e-commerce in any way. We cannot permit the use of the suffix "bay" to evoke eBay or as a shorthand reference to e-commerce.<p>We appreciate that you may have registered theplayersbay.com with the best of intentions and without full knowledge of the law in this area.<p>eBay respects your right of expression and your desire to conduct business on the Internet, but must enforce its own rights. To avoid further consumer confusion, eBay must insist that you not use the domain name for any purpose, do not sell, offer to sell or transfer the domain name to a third party, and instead simply let the domain registration expire. In the meantime, the domain name should remain inactive and should not point to any content.<p>Please confirm in writing that you will agree to resolve this matter as requested.
Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.<p>Sincerely,<p>Edith
eBay Legal Department
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I setup http://FeedmailPro.com about a year ago. It's a freemium product that I built to meet my own needs.<p>The site is now being used by about 700 blogs, only about 20 of them are paying $10/month which covers hosting costs but isn't much money otherwise.<p>The site has the potential to be bigger, but I don't currently have time to work on it as I'm working full time at a y-combinator startup and FeedmailPro is just a side project. And I don't want to just leave support requests unanswered and stop maintaining the site as a good number of people are using it now.<p>So I'm not sure what I should do. Could the site be sold or donated to someone else? If so where would I list it for sale and how could I find someone trustworthy to take it over? I could just close up shop but it is being used by a number of people now who have come to depend on it. Merging the service into someone bigger like MailChimp would be another option if I could get a meeting with those folks and they were interested.<p>Any ideas?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I just finished reading the SEOmoz beginner guide. And it seems to me that everything I read could be summarized in a tidy checklist.<p>Are there SEO "to-do" checklists (starting from the lowest hanging fruit and increasing in complexity) online?<p>As well: I'm interesting in expanding my knowledge of SEO. What should I read and do next?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: With all of the tech startup entrepreneurs, does anyone have experience in starting a bar? Any facts or figures you could provide about the cost to setup, info for getting licenses, etc.?
Upvote: | 65 |
Title: My social skills are going down exponentially day by day. I am an undergraduate at a university. I tend to be communicative with people who share similar interests (physics, hacking, heavy metal etc.). Is this for the worst? I know that HN is not a social advice site. But I believe that there'd be a couple of guys having had experiences like me who could give me some advice :)
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: Are there any actual studies and detailed research with proof that having my mobile phone on during take off or landing provides and increased risk of the plane crashing (or other adverse reaction?)<p>I mean logically if planes did not have sufficient shielding for this would a terrorist not just bring about 1000 phones (say its for export for sale) as hand luggage and just leave them on? Also some planes now now allow mobile phones to be used on board.<p>Things that have been done for the sake of it or have continued because that was the way it has always been really annoy me. And I really hate having to switch off my phone and my RSS reader getting dirty looks for fellow passengers.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: See the request from the Free Software Foundation:<p>http://www.fsf.org/news/uspto-bilski-guidance<p>Here are comments from a recent thread on HN:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1723904
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Hello, I don't have an elaborative question. I 'discovered' Plan9 yesterday. It seems like Plan9 was the successor to Unix. So why don't we see it in the mainstream?<p>What seemed intriguing to me was that for the last 8 years with all the linux/unix around, I never came across any references in - books/blogs/articles.<p>link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: I have been to a number of sites that I want to try out but give up when they force me to log in with 'connect with ' facebook. I know most people have it, but some don't. I don't.<p>You should really have your own authentication in my opinion, but if you insist on not, at least give me a few options.
Upvote: | 508 |
Title: When Yelp realized that Europeans may want to rate small businesses as well as Americans, they were confronted with Qype, a fairly direct knockoff started in Germany about a year after Yelp was founded. Because their business depends so heavily on how many reviews you already have (http://goo.gl/ykXu), it'll be hard to take them on.<p>So Yelp missed an opportunity somewhere during year one, but hey, it happens. They were busy and you can't do everything at once.<p>What strikes me as stranger is the businesses that have existed for several years, but still don't look across US borders. When I wanted to have some copies of my thesis printed, bound and shipped to Amsterdam, I was surprised that Lulu wasn't set up for it (they shipped from Spain, slowly and expensively) and there was no local equivalent in sight.<p>All right, all right, setting up a supply chain for mailing physical widgets in lots of confusing little European countries is hard. So let's look at a business that deals in purely virtual goods: Wufoo. I can't find a Wufoo-like thing that'll speak Dutch to me. At all.<p>Now you may object that Wufoo takes payments, and figuring out how people in lots of confusing little European countries like to pay their bills is not easy.<p>Which brings me to the last category: web startups that provide some really cheap service or content and that fund themselves largely by ads, or by the expectation that some large company will buy them out and figure out a revenue model later (if ever).<p>What do people in The Netherlands, to come back to my small but fairly internet-savvy home country, tend to use for small-time blogging? Blogger? Wordpress? Nope. Something called web-log.nl<p>Now don't get me wrong. I respect the entrepreneurs that started web-log.nl . They probably did a fine job, for all I know.<p>But there is an obvious missed opportunity for the US firms, methinks. Or is it just too hard?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Facebook generates a static url for each photo you upload. Regardless of what your privacy settings are, anyone can access that photo if he knows url of that photo. I don't think that this should be the ideal behaviour? I tried changing my privacy settings such that photos I am tagged in, should be visible to 'only me', but regardless of this, anyone who knows this url can see this photo. I think this is a big privacy leak issue, or am I missing some point ?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I'm assuming most people aren't using crunchbase for confidential searches, but just in-case anyone is, it looks like crunchbase saves every search and assigns it a sequential id which can than be used by anyone to look up that search.<p>For example a search I did:<p>http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/companies/506276<p>By incrementing/decrementing the counter on the end you can see the searches other people were doing at the same time.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: One thing I do is work out.<p>But I'm trying to find something I can do every night to wind down and have a bit of fun.<p>I'm thinking I might watch a movie (or part of one) a few nights a week. Maybe a tv show. Maybe read.<p>What else? What do you do?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: After repeated requests, I finally started a blog, but I have no idea what I'm doing. For me, commenting here at hn comes naturally but blogging doesn't. I'm so busy I don't have time, so I did the next best thing; I am "recycling" my old Hacker News comments. It only takes about 5 minutes each morning.<p>I don't have the most important thing I advise my customers: a goal. I'm not looking to drive traffic, make money, or get business. I do want to paint a picture of myself and my work and provide whatever value I can. I have included a link to my blog both here on my profile and as the last line of every email I send.<p>http://ShleppingData.com<p>After a few months, I'm wondering if I should continue. Is this a waste of time, or does it provide value and can it lead to something else?<p>1. No one has ever commented, so I just turned comments off. Does this make sense or just seem lame? Maybe they don't comment because it's recycled material.<p>2. Posterous allows up to 100 entries per screen, so I just set mine at the max. It's only text and almost everyone should have broadband by now, so it loads fast. Why would anyone set this lower?<p>3. Posterous allows tags, presumably to group similar posts, but I can't find any facility for an index or Table of Contents. So I just tag every post with it's own title. Again, does this make sense or does it just seem lame?<p>4. I named my blog "Shlepping Data", because the simplest explanation of what I do is "Shlepp Ones and Zeroes from Point A to Point B". (Of course there are a lot of details and I'm spending a lifetime mastering them.) I wanted to leave a touch of lightheartedness along with all the technical talk. Cool or lame?<p>5. Any other suggestions from seasoned bloggers are greatly appreciated. What else could provide value without investing too much time?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: With September over it's time to review my web site stats. Google Analytics tells me that in September I had 137,515 page views and 87,471 unique visitors. That's actually quite a typical month for my site.<p>I do two things currently to monetize the site (actually just my blog): AdSense and an affiliate link for my book. In September this resulted in:<p>1. £24.73 ($38.88) in AdSense revenue<p>2. 724 clicks on the affiliate link resulting in £27.39 ($43.08) in revenue from Amazon.com<p>So I made a total of £52.13 ($81.96) from my site in September.<p>Could I do better? If so, how?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Hi everyone,<p>I have been lurking around here for some time and am in love with this site. I figured now would be as good a time as any to ask my question.<p>I am a current college student majoring in Computer Science. I know that, after I am done with school, I want to start a startup at some point (not necessarily right out of school). I know it's going to involve a lot of hard work, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while now. So, my question is this: what sort of advice can you guys give me that will prepare me for such an undertaking. Thank you.<p>~Aaron
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: Please lead with the positions' locations.
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: We get a lot of "Who's hiring" threads on HN, but I bet many people are looking to join an early stage startup as a cofounder. In your comment, you should probably mention where you're located, what stage your startup/idea is at, who you're looking for, what you can bring to the table, and your contact info.<p>I'm posting this because I'm working on a startup solo, and I think finding a good cofounder is harder than it needs to be.<p>I'll start:<p>I'm working on a SaaS product to automate buying advertising online, everything from keyword/competitor research to optimization, and I'm looking for a technical cofounder in San Francisco. Think easy to use enterprise-class PPC management for small businesses.
I've built a prototype MVP which got very positive early feedback from potential customers. I can code if I have to, but my strengths are in marketing, optimizing, and the business side. I'm currently bootstrapping the startup, and plan to continue to do so until ramen profitability is reached.
If you're excited about making sense of massive datasets using technology like MongoDB and node.js, designing the architecture and technical vision of the company, and building the startup from the ground up, I want to talk to you. Python hackers who are amazing with regular expressions preferred.<p>Email me at ilya [at] unviral.com.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Ask HN: What's your favorite window manager for X11?<p>Do you prefer keyboard-driven window manager? and how do you arrange your windows to be more efficient?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: A take on the previous question, for the students browsing HN.
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: These days I see a lot of startup using Python. Earlier it used to be PHP, then came era of Ruby (mainly because of Ruby on Rails) and now it is Python.<p>Any special reason or everybody is just going with the flow or am I missing something?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: I was surprisingly entertained. The coding sessions and tech speak were obviously my favorite part.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Go check your email!
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: I can make the website, but don't know where to even begin to get the clothes made well, on the cheap.<p>I'm male, and want to design male clothes. (Think: t-shirts and tanks.) I would design everything myself (probably with photoshop).<p>After that - after I get a site up and sketch out my ideas - where do I go? Where can I get the clothes made, for instance?
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: I'm looking for an integrated payment handling solution for my startup but am cautious of PayPal given all the horror stories. The Amazon solutions aren't particularly attractive and they're not available in the UK afaik. Has anyone had experience with Google Checkout?<p>My ideal would be something like http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ -- they look awesome but are unfortunately US-only. There seems to be a UK-clone http://subsify.com/ -- but they haven't launched yet. Anyone know of any alternatives and care to share their experiences?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Hi! I've been working in technology for a long time, 20 years since I started my own little company in high school. For the last 6 years I've been privileged to work from home, mostly on open source software. This has involved a lot of travel and a LOT of hours of work per week, and the glamour of the dream career is fading. I want to simplify my life, cut my expenses, and work 2 or 3 days per week so that I can spend more time with my wife and daughter doing volunteer work and making a difference in the world. Everything I have learned about starting my own company or working at other companies points to making lots of money while working constantly, not making a small amount of money while working less. It seems like starting my own company is the only option, because every high tech company I've ever worked for wants people to work full time, and never hires part-timers.<p>Has anyone successfully moved to part time work, or started a company that allowed them to work 1000 hours a year instead of over 2000 hours a year?
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: I just had my IP banned from google and I couldn't understand why, after enabling the 'google toolbar'.<p>The toolbar is useful because it allows you to see the pagerank of your pages, after enabling it the browser will restart.<p>And that's where the problem will occur, if you have a large number of browser windows or tabs open when you do this (or if after a browser crash you do a recovery) google will interpret the flurry of toolbar requests when the browser comes back up as an attempt at automated requests to their servers and will block your IP accordingly.<p>Highly annoying! Effectively the use of one (luxury) google service disables the use of another one that is far more essential.<p>I hope there is a way out of 'toolbar induced google purgatory'.<p>update: I can use google again (after 15 minutes), but the toolbar still does not function.
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I went out to get a haircut today and had a chance to scan through crap magazines before my appointment.<p>Extremely worthwhile.<p>Anybody who is out of business ideas, specially "social apps" will do well consuming that garbage from time to time. It's simply full of insight into the mindset of a sizable segment of society. The ads within the pages are full of hints on what works.<p>I had a short stint as a reseller for luxury motorcycles, and I am 100% certain that my business would have benefited from an earlier exposure to these publications.
Upvote: | 117 |
Title: I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged, which I thought was a fantastic book. I'm reading Another Roadside Attraction now on the recommendation of a friend, but I think I want to read some non-fiction next, or at least eye-opening fiction. I'm thinking about some Bertrand Russel, Richard Feynman, or books on philosophy, human behavior, or economics.<p>What are some good books that you've read that are ground breaking, thought provoking, or changed the way you think/look at things?<p>ps: you can check out my shelf at shelfari.com/herms
Upvote: | 181 |
Title: Successful businesses often reinvent themselves for greater success in ways completely unanticipated beforehand. The longer your business survives, the more chances there are to find new ways to thrive.<p>The article http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint made it sound like they gave up. Businesses can survive even when their original goals do not—running a business isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.<p>Yes, Wesabe was behind in the race with Mint. But you don't "lose" until you go out of business.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: How do you evaluate your ideas, and decide which one to work on?<p>Do you use criteria like time required, cost, etc?<p>What have you tried, what would you like to?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: I have a product which asks user to register. I want to integrate an automated referral system into the emails I send out to my existing customers so that if they refer my app to any of their friends and the friends purchase it, both the friend and them get some discount. I checked zferral and hasoffers but both of them are for affiliates. I am looking for a easily integrable referral system like vonage to keep track.<p>Thanks.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I am a UK citizen with a profitable online business. I have no real responsibilities other than that and I would like to try living in a few different countries for a while before I have to settle in one place. My web business means I can work from anywhere as long as I have an Internet connection. Has anyone here in a similar situation tried this? What sort of hurdles did you face with visas? How was tax handled? Did earning your money online make things easier or complicate matters?
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: I have an undergraduate background in applied math and have taken basic linear algebra, differential equations, mathematical statistics and multivariate calculus. I'm rusty though, and I've been considering applying for PhD programs in statistics. I'd like to put myself on a healthy math regiment and I was wondering if people had suggestions on books or other materials to work on advanced (linear) algebra and analysis? I'm more than willing to spend an hour per page and do all the exercises, but I would like good exposition. My end goal is to have a reasonable understanding of things to make limit theorems in probability (during the first year of my PhD), etc, easier.
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: After reading some articles about virtual personal assistants, I want to ask the community, if they know of any good site to find me an assistant paid on an hourly basis for some research tasks I have to get done(i.e. finding tables of measurement data in a certain format). The tasks are not as simple as ordering food, but on a level low enough, so that they can be done by any half-way intelligent person without any previous knowledge on the topic.<p>I would really like to source some things out. Can you help me?<p>Edit: After doing some research, I found oDesk almost fits my needs, they are only missing one key feature: Searching for people speaking other languages than English.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I was fortunate enough to get accepted to startup-school. I'll be coming on Thursday afternoon, leaving on Monday morning. I've got a couple of desktop product, and I'm seriously working towards my own web-based startup. My questions are:<p>(1) Besides myself, what should I bring to the conference itself? Will a laptop just be a burden because of lack of space?<p>(2) Besides a pretty great lineup of speakers, what else should I expect?<p>(3) Besides pg's essays, is there anything I can do to prep, to make the experience more valuable?<p>(4) This might seem strange, but I've been dreaming about coming to Silicon Valley ever since I was a kid. I've been to SF once (loved it), but didn't make it to SV. Anything I should not miss in SV while I'm there? I just looked, and it seems most of the Computer History Museum is closed for renovations.<p>(5) Any other suggestions as to how I can make the most out of the experience?<p>Thanks.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: cached version (thanks to deusexmachina): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://fi.am/entry/your-content-is-distracting-your-users-from-the-ad/&cad=h
Upvote: | 197 |
Title: I usually watch some tech-talk which is not too techie.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: AI research and related topics and startups rarely make news. Is it really such a dead field? There's never any breakthroughs announced, and there's no grandiose research projects underway that I know of. I read every day how mobile social network platforms are being funded en masse in Silicon Valley while an entire branch of computing appears to be whithering away in the grips of academia.<p>Are there any websites that try to track the different AI projects going on? Which books should someone fascinated in this field be reading to try stay up to date?
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: Hi HN, posting this anonymously as my regular account contains my name.<p>I have been working as a developer for well over 10 years, have worked in both small companies as well as large agencies. I keep up to date with various technologies and attempt to learn best practices and methodologies. I do not have a college degree and so far that hasn't been much of an issue with jobs in NYC.<p>I am currently making $110k, and have consistently increased in salary year after year as well as from job to job - but I am concerned I am slowly starting to reach my upper limit on how much I will be able to earn as simply a developer - am I wrong in assuming this? Are my possible salary expectations for future positions (I am currently employed, however open to new opportunities and have recently had a few interviews that I am waiting to hear back on) too high?<p>Any feedback would be appreciated.
Upvote: | 115 |
Title: Details on six metrics that are related to customer retention and loyalty
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: I was surprised when I met several CS grads who were not using this, because they hadn't heard about it!
Upvote: | 117 |
Title: I am finishing some library frameworks for android development and attempting to pick a cool android project to complete from my list<p>One of the ones that stands out is maybe put a SIP/VOIP stack on top of JXTA-P2P.<p>What cool Android Projects are you guys and gals coming up with?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Can anyone recommend some good freelance job boards that are not eLance/oDesk etc.?
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: An advise to founders who can't code<p>If you are a business/idea guy and looking for a technical co founder, stop. Stop right now. Take 6 months off and go learn how to code (day and night, weekends including).<p>Most web apps do little besides save, show and update data. No, You will NOT become an engineer, programmer, or web developer, but you will be able to put a prototype of your idea together and maybe get one or two beta users for feedback. At this moment it will be much easier to recruit a technical cofounder.<p>The reason why most technical cofounders can create great products is not because they have a deep domain knowledge or they are great hackers. The reason is (beside passion for the problem) their cost is time. Your cost is money. They can spend one year working after hours to create a product. Can you pay someone for one year to create a product? They can fail 23 times and still find time to build their next idea. Can you convince your best friend to work on your 4th idea, when the previous 3 failed?<p>Here is the thing, 1 year from now, you will still have plenty ideas. But are you going to have ideas and the ability to implement them (or parts of the solution), or are you going to post one of those "Revolutionary Disrupting Idea with potential to make millions. Need Someone to build. Will give 15 % of revenue".<p>Stop and go learn. Worst case scenario, your future technical founder will respect you for trying, and you in return will truly appreciate their skills.<p>Note 1: If your idea is to build something truly technically challenging, then scratch my advice.<p>Note 2: Off course all the above would mean little if I wasn't the marketer/business/idea/support/whatever guy who spent the past few months learning. Email me if you are learning, maybe we can keep each other motivated.
Upvote: | 250 |
Title: What do you do if you feel you have all the advantages when it comes to programming -- intelligence, experience, passion, knowledge -- and yet they seem to desert you when you sit down to code?<p>One possibility is that I'm not as good as I think I am -- but I have had lots of validation. In the recent past (5 years) I've succeeded at some of the hardest interview processes in the world. I've written things that I'm proud of. I can speak as intelligently about code as any HNer.<p>Despite all this every time I sit down to code my brain turns to mush, somehow, and nothing gets done. I can always give my managers an intelligent explanation of why progress is so slow, but the thing is, progress is still slow. Lately I find myself making more and more beginner mistakes.<p>The weird thing is, I don't even feel burned out or depressed. I couldn't be happier with my current job. I'm just… stuck.<p>If something about this sounds familiar, feel free to offer advice. While psychological diagnoses may be right, at this point though I feel like there's something wrong in my <i>practices</i>.<p>I need some sort of professional help that doesn't exist. Someone to sit next to me all day and tell me what it is I'm doing that's burning up 8 hours a day without actually achieving anything.
Upvote: | 150 |
Title: Works in firefox or chrome, chrome only for websockets. Flickers bad in firefox.
http://rp.eliteskills.com/html5.php
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Please post money making web apps that you know of, like 37signals stack, dabble etc. That<p>1. were made by single hackers (or verry small teams)<p>2. make money<p>If possible add a short description.
Upvote: | 107 |
Title: I'm redesigning my web application — it's a SAAS app for project management — right now it looks too similar to Basecamp but I'm having trouble breaking out of the tabs-content-sidebar look.<p>I'm thinking of going with a totally different style.. inspired by http://www.alfredapp.com/<p>Big type, top-to-bottom, full screen.<p>What are some of your favorite web application user-interfaces + designs?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I need to register some .com domains, and it seems like a service I should be able to get very cheaply. Currently I use 123-reg.co.uk but I'm sure there must be something better out there. I'm also sure going with a cheap provider will likely turn out more expensive in the long run...
In case it makes a difference, I'd also like to migrate over a .name domain, to keep everything within one account.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: What do u do when bringing in a founder for the purpose of having a certain skill set on the team? What is fair for all?
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: WatchThis is a website that will help you watch good movies.<p>http://watchth.is/<p>Track the movies you want to see.
Share your love for movies.
Interact with other movie lovers.
Show off your profile.<p>--<p>For now, WatchThis is a students project (I work on it with KevinBongart), but we'd love it if it became more than that, of course. We both live in Paris, France.<p>
Here's the problem we're trying to fix. We all have a virtually unlimited access to thousands of movies online, and yet we're all watching a lot of crap. A lot of us have seen Transformers 2, and a lot of us still haven't see The Godfather!<p>
We want to help people to easily track the movies they want to watch (a to-watch list), and share their thoughts about the ones they saw.
On top of that, we recently launched better user profiles (with favorite movies) and the ability to follow users with an activity feed.<p>
We're keeping things very simple. We do not plan on adding a way to rate movies (we think it would discourage comments) or a recommendation engine (at least in the near future); we want people to break their habits, not recommend movies they, in a way, already know.
What do you guys think? Any advice?
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: Here's the website: http://markup.io/<p>We created MarkUp at Medium to help make the QA process better for
sites we're working on. Grab the MarkUp bookmarklet, go to some page
in your browser, then click it to draw on the page. Publish to make a
link you can share.<p>We've tried similar tools like BounceApp, Notable, and Skitch.
Everything else we found is screenshot-based or takes us out of the
browser. We wanted something that felt quicker than screenshots and
more integrated with the browsing experience.<p>Instead of taking a screenshot, MarkUp snapshots the DOM in the
current page, strips the javascript, and overlays a transparent DIV to
draw on. We used Raphael for the drawing tools. The server-side is
Node.js/Express.<p>What do you think? It's in beta and we'll be adding more features,
but we wanted to start getting feedback now.<p>Thanks
Upvote: | 90 |
Title: I understand that this wont make me a web Picasso or anything, but I would love to be 'not horrible' when it comes to sites design and UX. What are some good places to look at, get inspiration from, and especially, learn from?
Upvote: | 146 |
Title: When I first started delicious, we had to host most of the services ourselves. CVS, mail, mailing lists, etc etc etc.<p>These days, lots of that stuff is available as SaaS. What are the tools and services people use instead of hosting their own?<p>(I'm not talking about actual production services like EC2 and Heroku and whatnot. We can go over this in another thread.)
Upvote: | 240 |
Title: Who are the 13 Twitter users that North Korea has chosen to follow using their official uriminzok Twitter account?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I'm a long time developer that's recently moved into web development. I'm also based in the UK, so that seems to limit my options somewhat significantly.<p>As I understand it, my options are either speak to my bank about a internet merchant account, or use a third-party payment processor. It seems however, that if my company is newly formed and thus doesn't really have a trading history, the likelyhood of my bank allowing me to have an internet merchant account is slim. Using a third-party payment processor usually - from what I can see - results in customers being redirected to a third-party branded checkout page, which I want to avoid. Is this correct, or am I missing something?<p>If I have a merchant account and people are submitting payment data to my server that I am then passing on to be processed, I am responsible for PCI DSS compliance, correct? (Am I correct in my understanding that Braintree gets around this by having your checkout form POST to their servers?)<p>Lastly, can anyone recommend a means for me to accept credit and debit card payments [in pounds Sterling, for a UK site] for a newly formed business that doesn't use a third-party [Paypal, Google Checkout etc]?
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: The website is http://www.metahint.com<p>Currently we have a working prototype for searching some of our favorite blogs. We are soon sending out beta invites, and opening it up for general use.<p>Our idea is to make an embeddable search widget for websites, that generates suggestions from the content of the site. This came from the frustration that the search boxes on the vast majority of websites today do not suggest anything. While Google and Bing suggest previous queries, for small websites that might not be useful, so instead we extract phrases from the text and rank them by how well they describe a given page.<p>Let us know what you think, we are lkozma and pceelurd, lkozma has been on HN since the first days, when it was still SN.<p>Thanks !
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Recently a lot of sites are getting slow for me. The reason? They add a lot of social submit widgets that use non-async scripts.<p>If you see a substring <script src="http:// or <script src="https:// in your HTML source - you are killing your site slowly.<p>Using Twitter's official ReTweet button? You've slowed your site down by 60 seconds per each page (I don't know how many people are affected by this hiccup that lasts more than 5 days now for me, but you can easily fix it for everybody, see below)<p>Just to be clear. I'm on 35Mbps line in Russia near Moscow (4.3MBytes/s - very fast! 4ms ping to national traffic exchange point in Russia).<p>Yet some sites load up to 2-5 minutes for me? Why?<p>According to Chrome Dev Tools I receive main blog content, including all images within 1-2 seconds. (It's a 35Mbps!), but I don't see anything from your site on screen (even though it has finished loading), because...<p>"platform.twitter.com" responds in 49-62 seconds! Uses <script src="http://... for their "retweet" button. Your site is STUCK until "platform.twitter.com" loads (1 minute).<p>Facebook's CDN responds within 30-50 seconds. The site doesn't load until it's loaded.<p>"www.stumbleupon.com"'s button loads in 20 seconds.<p>I'm not sure what the problem is, but I can tell you for sure - it takes minutes to load some sites with those buttons, it takes less than a blink after I add "127.0.0.1 platform.twitter.com" and others to /etc/hosts (that's not a way to solve it, it's a way to diagnose the problem, see below for solution).<p>Many of you use a lot of those buttons in hope that they will bring you visitors. But while they load - they lose you visitors that have to wait 2 minutes for your page to load.<p>WordPress' social submit plugins are often have the same effect on your site.<p>The solution? Use async code and ask your plugin developer to move to async code.<p>It's not some futuristic HTML5 goodie that works only in modern browsers. It works everywhere.<p>Facebook has async code - use it!
Google Analytics has async - use it!<p>Twitter doesn't give out async, but it's easy to do it, based on FaceBook and Google Analytics code:<p><pre><code> <a href="http://twitter.com/share"
class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal"
data-via="WhitePostsCom">Tweet</a>
<script>
(function() {
var src = document.createElement('script');
src.async = true;
src.src = document.location.protocol + '//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(src);
}());
</script>
</code></pre>
Replace the first part with your own code instead of WhitePostsCom one.<p>StatCounter doesn't give async, adapt it from the code StatCounter gives you:
(There was a day when StatCounter didn't load in 2 minutes! Your site is stuck again if you don't do async)<p><pre><code> <!-- Start of StatCounter Code -->
<script type="text/javascript">
var sc_project=[YOUR CODE HERE];
var sc_invisible=[YOUR CODE HERE];
var sc_security="[YOUR CODE HERE]";
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script');
ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.statcounter.com/counter/counter.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>
<noscript><div
class="statcounter"><a title="web analytics"
href="http://statcounter.com/" target="_blank"><img
class="statcounter"
src="[YOUR CODE HERE]"
alt="web analytics" ></a></div></noscript>
<!-- End of StatCounter Code -->
</code></pre>
StumbleUpon? Adapt it from the above codes.<p>Seeing someone asking you to insert '<script src="http://' into your code? Tell them to do better engineering and stop slowing down your site.<p>P.S. The reasons for hiccups of Twitter and FB's CDN might be poor peering, bad servers, anything really. You can't fix Twitter's and Facebook's software and servers, but you can let your visitors see your site without depending on how good do engineers at those companies do their job.<p>P.P.S. There is a good question in comments about how to diagnose your own site's problems: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1771755<p>Problematic hosts list (the srcs that cause sometimes huge slowdowns for me) - just in case you need it:<p><pre><code> widgets.digg.com
platform.twitter.com
static.ak.fbcdn.net
www.stumbleupon.com
i.ixnp.com</code></pre>
Upvote: | 306 |
Title: 7 months ago, I posted asking the community how I could most efficiently make 300-400 US dollars a month, my cost of living, online (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171520). You guys really poured out good ideas and several of you offered me work.<p>Patio11 was among those: he offered to pay me 400 USD a month, every month, to make a custom Wordpress theme for him. I took him up on it. His offer really helped. The ability to hammer out a Wordpress theme and cover my living costs in a short period of time meant that I could hire out someone else to do the tasks that were taking all of my time to pay for my food and rent. With the new-found free time, I was able to focus on marketing and sales and grow the service I had been doing myself into a larger business. By the time the 2nd Wordpress theme was due, I had run overdue on its deadline because my tiny business had been covered by some major media and I was swamped with just keeping it up and running. Thankfully Patrick was understanding when I turned in the late 2nd project and told him I simply had no more time to design for him due to my personal business's growth.<p>Fast-forward a few months. I now have 5 people working under me (3 full-time, 2 part-time) and my own office. Things are still hard, and I'm not rich, but I'm in a much better place than I was when I first posted. Thank you!
Upvote: | 620 |
Title: If you have a desktop/mobile/web application that is sustainable and you can be able to live on its profit, list them here. Thanks!
Upvote: | 118 |
Subsets and Splits