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Title: I noticed a few threads with people saying that their company is hiring and it's been about a month since the last one of these (so I'm sure needs have changed).<p>As a reminder, please include the location if you would need employees to work on-site.
Upvote: | 161 |
Title: I'll be deactivating my Facebook account (tainting what I need to) and removing as much information there as possible within the week.<p>I'm not a hardcore privacy advocate, but I joined Facebook with the understanding that some of what data placed there would stay private. That is what we agreed to.<p>Facebook has repeatedly violated that trust.
Upvote: | 105 |
Title: I read a lot about, how ideas are worth next to nothing. As many have pointed out in the past, ideas are worth a negative amount if anything (since you have to put in all the work and money). Also it was interesting to read about all the positive affects of sharing your startup idea (others will help you polish your idea).<p>Still, I'd like to ask...
Did any of you have bad experiences because you shared your startup idea with someone you should not have? What happened?
Upvote: | 42 |
Title: Speech recognition seems good on a cell phone but accuracy for conversational speech flatlined in 2001--and no one noticed. Computer understanding of language was supposed to lead to artificial intelligence. Now we have need AI to get computers to understand language. Catch 22. We just haven't recognized it yet. (Sorry, Ray Kurzweil.)
Upvote: | 138 |
Title: what an awesome idea!
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: Any good videos/books/code ?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I started this rant over at help a startup out, but had more to rant about so its on my blog now. Basically a real world response to Calcanis and Suster
Upvote: | 146 |
Title: "Since "gmail" is 50% fewer characters than "googlemail," we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!"
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: In the past when Scribd has come up on Hacker News, a handful of HN readers made no secret of the fact that they saw the Scribd product as flawed. While the harsh feedback was painful at times, it was important for us to hear.<p>We are sincerely grateful for the advice and criticism that we got from the very smart people on HN. The conversations we have had with people here were instrumental in our understanding what was bothering people about Scribd, and how to fix it.<p>Today we're launching the largest product change ever on Scribd, and one that goes directly to the heart of those concerns. We are leaving Flash and moving to all HTML5.<p>The #1 problem people had with Scribd was the Flash reading experience. Scrolling was problematic, you said. It didn't respect your browser's search, text selection, or keyboard shortcuts. It didn't feel like your PDF reader, either, and it was missing functionality you expected in a document reader. Sometimes it slowed down or crashed your browser.<p>At a higher level, people challenged why we were using Flash to display documents in the first place. A lot of you suggested we build a Google books style viewer, using AJAX and images.<p>We ended up taking that suggestion, but we took it a step further. Rather than building yet another reading application based on images, we used the magic new stuff in HTML5 to convert documents into fully native webpages. It took us a while because we built this from scratch, and it was hard to do.<p>The result is that the reading experience on Scribd is now incredibly light and fast. It's no different, really, from reading a blog, since it's all in plain HTML yet it still preserves the exact complex and rich formatting of the original document. While it's an early beta product, I think it is already way better. But don't take my word for it - try it yourself:<p>http://www.scribd.com/html5<p>What is Scribd, anyway?
There’s been a lot of confusion among HN readers over what Scribd is supposed to do, and I want to clear it up. The point of Scribd is, most emphatically, <i>not</i> to replace your PDF viewer, and that’s why we encourage users to download documents in whatever format they want. If you try to think of Scribd as an Acrobat/Preview/Foxit competitor you’ll never understand it. The purpose of Scribd is two-fold:
1) For authors/publishers: to provide a place where they can publish their book, essay, presentation, magazine, legal document, poem, catalog, scientific paper, etc. to a wide audience
2) For readers: To provide a place where you will occasionally find interesting content generally not available elsewhere and make it easy to share that content with your social graph.<p>Scribd’s real value is in the unique content – not available elsewhere – that we have added to the web. It is that store of content and the community around it that has made Scribd popular among authors, students, business professionals, musicians, cooks, companies, publishers, and other wide-ranging types of people.<p>What HN made clear was that while building out that community, we could not ignore the reading experience itself. When you find an interesting document on Scribd, you expect to be able to read it in an easy, natural way. That’s what we’ve tried to build.<p>Feedback
When we've gotten feedback from HN, it has ended up dramatically improving the product. I have every reason to expect the same will happen this time. And I think we've shown that we do pay attention to what gets written here. So, please, tell us what you think in the comments (or email me directly). Kindly keep the discussion to the reading experience itself for now – that’s what we’re really trying to improve.<p>What else can we do to make Scribd the best reading experience on the web? The whole team at Scribd is anxiously waiting to hear your answer.
Upvote: | 220 |
Title: Today, I was served the new Google homepage, the first that struck me out was how inconsistent it was. I started to look at all the inconsistencies and found many of them:<p>- 3 different arrows for the more links.
- mixed use of upper/lower case for the "M" in the more links.
- the position of "advanced search" between the home page and the results page.
- the position of the search button (kind of within the input field on the results page but below with space on the home page).
- you see "Everything" with an icon in front of it (why the icon?) and then you have a link with more, what is more than everything?
- etc.<p>It can be a game to find so many design errors, things totally wrong when looking at the whole page.<p>I asked myself, why? Then I found, it is simply A/B testing gone crazy. They have tested gazillions of independent small changes in their multivariate tests, found the <i>optimal</i> combination, but, forgot the big picture.<p>So maybe the new home page and results page are the optimal ones, but they are inconsistently optimal. For the first time in many years, the Google pages now "feel wrong".<p>This is annoying me a lot, for 2 things:<p>- I hate it when I search.
- It will spread like wild fire because if Google has done it, it must be good, so bad designers will just copy the design without thinking twice (so I will need to support that in many other websites).<p>And you, what do you think about it?
How are you designing your A/B tests not to fall in this trap?
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: Yesterday we posted on Hacker News asking for your feedback, and wow, did you guys come through! We are very so grateful for all the great constructive feedback we received. We hope that going forward we can continue to use Hacker News as a sounding board to help make our product better.<p>To say thank you, we'd like to invite all users of Hacker News to the Scribd 3 Year Anniversary Party tonight in SF. We honestly didn't plan to do this originally, but we were so overwhelmed by the response that it felt like the right thing to do. Here is the invitation:<p>http://anyvite.com/events/home/dq4gjpnquo/w7ji380d8kmwpc/lhckmc261rk4agq2gz7v<p>To get in, just bring your Hacker News user name and the password is "font". Hope to see you guys tonight!<p>Thanks,
The Scribd Team
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: Hello Paul,<p>What is the deal with search on HN?<p>There isn't a week or some new HN member posts a question about how to search HN, most of the time they are either confused about why there is no search on the site, in other cases they are trying to find some article and can't locate it.<p>The various fixes (google using the site: prefix and pointers to searchyc.com) have been repeated so often that I suspect some users have programmed function keys to save on the typing :)<p>I see that news.ycombinator.com promotes 'webmynd' as a search facility, however when compared to either google or searchyc it comes up short.<p>I appreciate you sticking up for the companies that YC funds, and of course this is your site and you can do with it as you please but what confuses me is that there seems to be no net benefit to webmynd from being listed on YC, whereas there is a significant loss for those that use news.ycombinator and that don't have an easy way to search the site. It makes news.ycombinator look less professional and it confuses people with some regularity.<p>Why won't you add a box that submits a google site search or a search on searchyc to HN?<p>Either that or ask the webmynd guys to get their act together and create something that is on par with searchyc, they seem to be able to get it to work, and for free and 'unfunded' no less.<p>If anything you could throw them a bone and show some appreciation for the work they've done supplying a missing feature at essentially no cost to HN. Or is there bad blood between news.ycombinator and searchyc that I'm not aware of?<p>Fred has indicated many times that he spoke to you about this, but so far I can't really make soup out of your position, after all, I take it that you want HN to be the best possible site for your users.
Upvote: | 159 |
Title: I was vacuuming my apartment, and pondering what "distributed model" would work?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I know we tend to drown in all the tech, entrepreneurship, fresh ideas, ipad news, facebook privacy issues and the lack of HN search. But let's not forget our mothers :)<p>Give them a call, a present, a longer hug than usual or whatever suits you (and your mom)<p>I know, mother's day is just one huge commercialized drama nowadays but take it from me (or don't); most mothers -do- care about this day!
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Hello hackers, I shortly release my first android application and had like to know, what are some average normal numbers on the android store? care to share your average revenues, my daily are ~ $10 , is it normal?
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: What works for you and what don't. Lets hear it.<p>I don't know about you guys but vitamin b complex really helps in my ability to focus and mental acuity.
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: It seems that you can make anybody follow you by tweeting "accept username". Does it work for you too? This looks like an awful vulnerability to me.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: A perfect example of how not to "personalize" your startup's welcome e-mail.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I'm kind of freaking out. Been working on this for a while (too long), but finally decided it was time to push the button, backlog be damned.<p>It works. It does something. It has bugs. But that's the point of the MVP, right?<p>Anyway, I could use some moral support. This is very scary.<p>Link: http://sproutrobot.com/
Upvote: | 362 |
Title: Anand beats Topalov in the 12th game with black pieces
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: The Humble Indie Bundle sale is over, and it raised over $1,000,000. As a result, Wolfire games has released the source code to Lugaru.
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Thank you to Hacker News readers. You helped us take an idea 428 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510656) to market and ink the biggest deal in our space (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Farmers-Insurance-Deploys-prnews-2031715293.html?x=0&.v=1). You rock.
Upvote: | 72 |
Title: Can someone point me to the apps made by maxklein of blog.cubeofm.com fame?<p>His blog posts regularly make the front page here. Most recently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1344062<p>He has stated revenue primarily comes from app store, where he sells "A lot of small cheap apps.", and also that last month sales came close to 40k.<p>cubeofm.com lists one "Art you should know" app and a desktop appstore stats app. iTunes shows no other apps by that apps author. So, can someone point me to some of the "small cheap apps" he sells?
Upvote: | 96 |
Title: I like taking a jump in the deep end approach.<p>I'm a Java developer turned iPhone developer.<p>What books do you recommend? When I first started iPhone development, I bought hundreds of dollars of books and it helped tremendously to have different teachers on paper. What are the best-of-class Android apps (in terms of user experience) that you like? What are your favorite apps? What is the best part about working with Android?<p>I'd like to port a fairly complicated iPhone application to Android. Since I want to support the widest range of Android devices, I'm targeting the G1 as the lowest common denominator. The existing iPhone application heavily relies on CoreData, and I feel that is the biggest hurdle. Are there are any CoreData like persistence frameworks? I, admit too, that I am scared of the "unholy mixture of XML and GridBagLayout" that is required to build UIs in Android - but that is a secondary concern.<p>Is three weeks, give or take a few days, too aggressive a deadline for doing a port from iPhone to Android? I will compromise where needed.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: I put in my notice a couple of weeks ago. Today is my last day! I will be working with RyanElkins (a fellow hacker) on IActionable.com full-time starting next week. We received some initial funding through a local program called BoomStartup.com.<p>One thought I wanted to share was on my experience letting my coworkers know that I am leaving. I was definitely not prepared for the responses I received. When people first heard I was leaving almost everyone jokingly responded with "Traitor! Who are you leaving us for? Is it more money?!". But once I explained that I'm doing my own thing the attitude change was amazing. I wasn't told "You're crazy!" but instead I was congratulated and applauded as if I had broken free from some captor and were cheering me to run as fast and as far as I can. I was also reminded over and over again to remember them as if I was supposed to return and free them. Perhaps one day :)<p>Of course, from my perspective I feel more like I'm late to a marathon that I have been jealously watching others run for years. The feedback we received from our 'Review our Site' posts as well as everyone's experiences that were shared here have definitely helped us get to where we are today.<p>Thank you Hacker News - Here we go!
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Right now I have some code started for a bookmarklet that runs on Facebook and scans some of the most common privacy holes that are enabled by default. It shows a summary and has "one-click fixes" to lock down those privacy settings. Check it out here:<p><pre><code> http://www.reclaimprivacy.org
</code></pre>
I started this project last weekend on my flight back from Michigan to the Bay, and I just don't have enough free time to really make it solid. The bookmarklet needs better cross-browser testing (I works well in Safari 4, and mostly okay in FF3), and there are plenty of important privacy checks that it still needs to do (wall-post privacy settings, photo privacy settings, etc). A few of the checks can be wonky at times, especially the ones that scan the privacy dropdowns.<p>So...join in! If you want to contribute, just fork it on GitHub:<p><pre><code> http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy
</code></pre>
...I'll check pull requests periodically and redeploy the latest patches. The project is contained in an AppEngine app since that was the easiest thing to throw up on a Google domain this morning.
Upvote: | 120 |
Title: I've been in China for just under a year, and in that time have found ever larger portions of the free internet cut off. At first it wasn't too hard to get around, using Google's cache, some web proxies and then Tor.<p>But the state is cracking down, cutting off more of these avenues. Google cache is now blocked, deep packet inspection is analysing traffic that comes from web based proxies and blocking anything... that's normally blocked. And finally Tor is being effectively tackled.<p>It's public list of access points to the Tor network is blocked, and now Tor bridges are being blocked hours and minutes after them being made available. Tor is being defeated.<p>Top this off with an ever growing list of useful websites and services being cut off; half of anything Google does, Dropbox, and now Zoho.com's services.<p>Just as I begin a small web development company based in China, we get our first customer in the U.S. and are about to start using Zoho to manage the project only to find that it's blocked (it was working yesterday dammit!).<p>What kind of damage is this doing to China's startups? I mean I can't be the only one that this is affecting?<p>I'm on a shoes-string budget and even if I had the cash I don't have a credit card that can make payments in $US to buy VPN access.<p>Sorry for the rant but first Dropbox and now this, it's getting ridiculous. Any ideas on dealing with this?
Upvote: | 109 |
Title: Hello Hn'ers,<p>What hobbies do you have?<p>What do you do to wind down when you're afk?
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Hey guys, my startup http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ (A/B testing tool) is just out of beta and we launched paid plans early this week. To announce that we have launched, I had mailed a personalized pitch to Mashable, RWW, TechCrunch, LifeHacker. But no one replied!<p>I know they must be getting 100s of pitches daily but I think our story is as good as other startups that they cover. We are bootstrapped, had 1200 beta users and now in the first week have actual paying users (with very close to being profitable). Users think our tool beats Google's tool by a huge margin (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/testimonials.php) and it is actually very helpful to small businesses and marketers (in beta, we have user case studies where sales and conversions got increased by 20-90%). So, what's wrong with the pitch? Based on what I read, I even mailed link to this 2 minute short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YYNebfuvLc<p>I realize that getting covered on a major blog doesn't ensure startup success, but it is still a great way to announce to the world that you are open for business. So, what is the best way to get major bloggers write about my startup?<p>Are bloggers not writing about us because we are bootstrapped, based out of India and non-YC (or associated with a similar program)? Is there anything wrong with my approach?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Especially in Berlin!
Upvote: | 106 |
Title: While I am a software developer, somehow the thought of working for another company depresses me a lot at the moment. I guess ultimately I enjoy thinking about concepts more than the actual programming. Programming is a means to an end to realize my ideas. But programming for another company would mean programming for programming's sake. (Just trying to understand why the thought depresses me so much).<p>And yet, I need money. I wish I could think of any other way to earn minimum living expenses than developing. I'd love to just work in a cafe or a book shop for a couple of days, but I worry that it might not pay well enough.<p>Part time developer jobs are also hard to come by (which would leave me time to work on my own projects, hopefully alleviating my depression).<p>Maybe somebody here has ideas for a middle road?<p>It would also be great to work not sitting at a desk all the time.
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: A few of the flight simulators I work with use a novel software framework developed inhouse by the manufacturer. I'm curious if any of you can
identify something similar.<p>The convential approach for commercial flight simulators is to use a large shared memory to hold the state of the simulation, and a game loop. Hardware interface signals are fed into that shared memory, and every iteration of the game loop executes software that reads and updates the shared memory.<p>The novel approach uses no shared memory. When a hardware input signal changes, it raises an "event" consisting of a name and value. The
software then raises any other events that depend on this one. They have created a programming language to get the most from this. In that language, say you have:<p>a = b + c<p>d = e + f<p>These two lines will NOT get executed in sequence. They declare relationships between events. When event "b" occurs, the event "a" will be raised and its value depends on b and also the last value of the c event.<p>It turns out this is really powerful and works well on a distributed system. Did they create something new here?
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: I've been living in the Bay Area (in Berkeley) on a J-1 research visa for half a year, fell in love with the startup community and now I need to extend my stay. As a "researcher" at UC Berkeley I was able to work on my own projects and engage in the nearby startup scene without problems.<p>Now that I need to find a legit job allowing me to stay in the U.S., I'm afraid that I will not be able to work on my own projects as much anymore. In Germany I used to work as a freelance consultant. Is it possible to get a Visa doing freelance work? Or part-time work?<p>Another question is what kind of Visa I can get? Apparently regular H1-B working Visas are handed out only in April, so I'm out of luck. Is it easier to get internship Visas?<p>The next-best thing to working on my own projects would be to work for an early stage startup (the earlier, the better). Is it even possible/economical/easy for a small startup to acquire a working Visa for me?<p>I should talk to a lawyer but I figured that HN is more likely to provide me with the "dirty" tricks of immigration ;)
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: I've never been a fan of how hard it is to sift through "Who's Hiring?" threads, but the recent "Who's hiring in <region>?" threads are not the solution. They clutter up the homepage more, and they still don't fix the fact that there's 63 comments on the "Who's Hiring in Europe Thread?" and there probably aren't more than 5 for any one city (so if you don't want to relocate, you're still getting a low signal:noise ratio).<p>What we need (unless pg were to want to actually add some kind of structured hiring functionality, which seems unlikely) is a standardized format that makes it easy to Ctrl+F through them to find things you want.<p>Here's a proposed format:<p><general description of the job, mentioning the company name, what you're doing, the level of experience it is, etc. whatever you want><p>Location: <List any way someone would refer to your location or locations nearby-enough that it still applies. Include the word "remote" if you'll accept remote workers><p>Technologies: <List all of the technologies that someone in this job will be using><p>Position: <Include the word the word "developer", "designer", or "infrastructure" if it's one of those, but you can go into more detail><p>So first you describe the job like normal (but possibly leaving out some of the info that will come later), then you add what amounts to metadata to make it easy to search through.<p>Here's an example of how a job (http://posterous.theresumator.com/apply/JbAS4A/) would look when translated to this format (Note that I'm not associated with Posterous and that I may be misrepresenting the job in this post. I just chose it because it was on the jobs page.):<p>Posterous is looking for battle-tested, seasoned, war-hardened backend infrastructure engineers who love building and maintaining software used by millions of people. You'll work with a driven team of like-minded software engineers to build the next great Internet treasure. You are a skilled craftsman when it comes to capacity, uptime and scaling, and love it when your site is humming along like a well-oiled machine.<p>We want someone who has built for massive scale and will be able to build our tech stack to support hundreds of millions of uniques per month.<p>Compensation includes full time salary, generous equity compensation plan, and benefits.<p>Location: San Francisco, SF, Bay Area, Silicon Valley<p>Technologies: Linux, NoSQL, MongoDB, Casandra<p>Position: Senior Infrastructure Engineer<p>Note that I listed "Silicon Valley" as a location even though it's not. Someone looking for jobs in the Valley would probably be willing to consider jobs in SF, so they should list it. When it doubt, list it.<p>It's a little rough and certainly needs some tweaking, so I'd love comments on how to improve it. But I think that some standardized format like this could make it a lot easier to look through these. If you're looking for a Rails job anywhere, Ctrl+F for "rails". If you're looking for a job in NYC, Ctrl+F for "NYC" or "New York". Much easier than having to look through them all.
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: I'm a retired physicist. I used to work in the industry. I have now time for theoretical research and have something to publish. Is it possible to publish in peer-review journal without affiliation?
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: Funny question maybe, for a 'social bookmarking' site, but this sub-thread:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351584<p>Makes me wonder if we can't put together a list of really good resources on the web that is based on what HN members consider 'good'.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: Ben Adida on the recent privacy breach disclosures:<p>"If you’re shocked, outraged, writing lengthy TechCrunch posts about these developments, you probably don’t understand computer security very well, and you’d better sit down with a stiff drink, because these issues are the tip of the iceberg."
Upvote: | 58 |
Title: The competition in the smartphone market is most definitely heating up. While most people, or at least most geeks (let’s be honest, chances are you are one) hear constantly about iPhone sales and Apple’s increased dominance in this space, the truth is Apple is not even close to Nokia or RIM when it comes to phones sold globally.
Upvote: | 47 |
Title: I occasionally invest in startups. Please chime in if you are also an angel.
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: I recently did a search on Google using the "Wonder Wheel", which lists related queries as spokes off of your original query. When I searched with my girlfriend's name, one of the spokes was my own name. Not a problem here, as many search results point back and forth between the two of us (blog, twitter, etc).<p>However, another spoke off of my girlfriend's name was surprisingly my ex-girlfriend's name. Now, of course, this might make sense if they had any related search results, but they don't. There's absolutely nothing on the web that directly links one to the other or contains both of their names. Moreover, there's nothing on the web that links me to my ex, so it can't even be an indirect connection of that sort through me.<p>Point is, I'm concerned as to how Google came to link the two. Since my current girlfriend and ex have never, to the best of my knowledge communicated online in any way (publicly or privately), the only explanation I can come up with is that Google has taken note that my girlfriend and ex may have done Google searches on each other. Has an invasion of privacy gone on here? Can you think of any other possibilities?<p>UPDATE: If we don't come up with a reasonable explanation, how should I take this up with Google?<p>FURTHER UPDATE: Anyone interested in trying the search from themselves can leave contact info for me somewhere. As long as you seem trustworthy and will not share them with others, I'll send you an email with our names so you can confirm/investigate.
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: A few minutes ago I stumbled upon a submission chastising WakeMate for still not shipping. There were 6 comments. I hit refresh and the title changed to [dead] and the submission was removed from the front page. What is going on?<p>At this URL the comments can still be found: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358309
Upvote: | 124 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>I'm currently digging into case studies on how to do startups in the bootstrapping way; and so I turn to the nice HN community: what other blogs fits into the criteria?<p>Definitions:<p>successful: $1k/month at minimum<p>transparent: blog describing the internal business process of creating the startup<p>bootstrapper: no external investment<p>The ones I know of:<p>http://www.balsamiq.com/blog -balsamiq mockups<p>http://www.kalzumeus.com/ -patrick -bingo card creator (and others)<p>http://pluggio.com/blog/ -Pluggio (was: tweetminer)<p>Who else would fit into this criteria?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: Wondering if anyone has advertised on these tech-heavy niche ad networks, and if so, what were the results?<p>Here are the links:<p>http://decknetwork.net/<p>http://fusionads.net/creative-network/<p>http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/<p>http://inedomedia.com/stackoverflow.aspx
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Tekpub.com was originally written using ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft's newest framework - which the founders new really well. However they recently moved to Rails and NoSQL.
Upvote: | 110 |
Title: ... on this occasion I'm at a loss. There was an item entitled:<p>"Unanswerable multiple choice question"<p>and it was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1363393<p>There was a lively discussion, and it got lots of upvotes. That, of course, of itself does not mean it was on-topic, but the guidelines say:<p><pre><code> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
That includes more than hacking and startups. If
you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might
be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual
curiosity.
</code></pre>
This particular question was a great example of that last point. Treated carefully
it can be used as a starter for paradoxes of all kinds, and self-referential discussions that can lead to correct and appropriate explanations of Goedel's theorems, recursion, formal systems and probability.<p>I will almost certainly now be using it in my next math club talk, and have already started discussions about it with colleagues in the local university math department.<p>So why was it killed?<p>Probably "the judges decision is final" will reign, but I'm annoyed at this one.
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: I love HN.<p>But HN is so news oriented it doesn't give me the kind of hacker/entrepreneur community that I'm envisioning.<p>What are some other sites where hackers/entrepreneur go to just to ...<p>- discuss early stage startup ideas<p>- brainstorm implementations and solutions<p>- give each other feedback on prototypes<p>... as suppose to commenting on news? I guess like a forum?<p>Reading news gets old after a while and makes me feel like I'm just a follower not a leader.<p>I'm planning to start a web community if there isn't one. I did a survey to see if people would be interested here:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358654<p>But that post quickly got drown out by the noon news flood, which is part of the problem that I'm talking about.<p>(P.S. I do go to real-life meetups of hackers/founders. Those are great but scarce. The only good one I have been to so far in the Bay Area is "hackers and founders". And they don't even meet that often in San Francisco.)
Upvote: | 210 |
Title: I feel a business that doesn't get mentioned that often around here is Etsy. While the money raises and investors behind it can be read about on Tech Crunch, not much is mentioned about the business.<p>Thought I would get some discussion going on it:
-How do you feel Etsy was able to overcome the Chicken and the egg problem?
-Were they able to just find a great market that was being underserved by eBay?
-Do you see other markets that could flourish by being "spun" out of eBay?
-How were they able to market themselves to not only shopkeepers but consumers as well?<p>I am sure there are other good questions as well..
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Hey guys,<p>I was listening to a podcast that made me realize how I'm surrounded by book smart people and am mostly book smart myself. I'm sure this describes a lot of people here on HN.<p>As an aspiring entrepreneur I'm striving to become more street smart and to be able to persuade people, not get screwed over, negotiate well, create and see opportunities, be able to make things happen that other people can't etc etc.<p>What stories do people have of experiences, lessons, things they have seen or read that they feel have taught them some more street smarts? Would love to hear them.<p>The irony of looking for books on how to become more street smart is not lost on me btw.<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 129 |
Title: Mine:
- Wake
- Shower/Teeth
- Get Dressed
- Coffee
- Internet: HN, mail, twitter, google reader/calendar, random browsing
- Workout.<p>Then begins the day.
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: Who wants to "open the kimono" a little on their SaaS experience? :) For the good of all, naturally.<p>I'm looking for info on people's experiences of free:paid account ratios. Not just traffic:signup of paid accounts rates, but over time (after signups).<p>Give to get: Freckle (http://letsfreckle.com) has a fairly typical conversion rate for signup - between 1 and 4%, on any given day, heavily dependent on the source/type of traffic. Overall, 7.8% of all our accounts are paid accounts.<p>I'd also love any posts, essays, etc., that you know that discuss this rate. I haven't had much luck googling.<p>EDIT: Made my intro more compelling ;)
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I had a friend send me a link to some jokes yesterday. I laughed for about an hour.<p>Then I realized that I hadn't laughed or smiled at web content in quite some time.<p>So today's topic: humorous nerdy phrases on T-shirts -- of interest to hackers or not?<p>I think humor and light-heartedness is very interesting and also good for you. I just posted "Nerdy Cute Girls. In T-Shirts" and it was deleted within minutes. There was no nudity, no profanity. It was just funny nerd jokes on shirts with cute girls under them.<p>Now I could give a shit whether HN wants to delete this post or not, and I really don't want to promote myself in those keyword areas, but the post wasn't controversial or off-topic. Lame and trivial, perhaps. But fuck dudes, there are a zillion lame and trivial posts every day. Just don't upvote them. Instead I got the immediate "what is this? Reddit?" (Which I thought was hilarious in itself actually. I could just picture some overly-serious internet curmudgeon banging away the required response)<p>So what do you guys say? Can we share jokes and light-heartedness every now and then as long as we identify in the title what it is? Or would the presence of jokes derail the community forever and lead us down a path of wanton banality?<p>I know the standard response. I'm just thinking that I've become much less happy over the last two years, and hanging out in a joke-free zone with a bunch of Mr. Spock wannabes might be part of that.<p>So while I understand the theory in "no jokes" I wonder what the long-timers think of the effect on them after a while. For those of you wanting to psychoanalyze me, probably a more useful response would be to post some links for receiving tech humor on a daily basis. This not only makes you look like less of a jerk, it helps other people with similar questions.<p>What do you guys think?
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: My night and weekends project for over a year - 'Programming Windows Azure' published by O'Reilly is finally out.<p>When I started off, I've tried to write a book I'd like to read myself. That means a sense of humor (hopefully), lots of code (especially code that doesn't involve the Microsoft stack) and in general, being very deep technical. The code samples are mostly in C# but they are easily translatable to any language/platform you like. I've snuck in a chapter based purely on Python too.<p>I've tried to make this book not as dry as a lot of other technical books. You'll find , among other things, hidden references to Star Trek (TNG and TOS), BSG and atleast one Office-based code sample.<p>I feel a bit bad about plugging my own work on HN but since this essentially took over my life for over a year, I thought it was justified :).
Upvote: | 55 |
Title: A nice book to celebrate his birthday, click on the picture for pdf.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: So am I the only one that has noticed the rise of company-vs-company soap opera news. All these he-said-she-said stories and analysis.<p>Is it just me or is HN turning into more a CNN type outlet than hacker news (useful / fun shit we should care about)?<p>And who's upvoting it all to the frontpage anyway? Why?? :-/
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: There's an old internet joke, that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.<p>The way to let people know that you're not a dog, is to establish an identity, maybe a short blurb about yourself and a way to contact you out-of-band.<p>Lots of HN profiles are blank, and the nicknames used are anonymous. Of course, the theory is that since we are all judging your writings by their merits it is just as good to get that information you just wrote from an anonymous source as it would be to get it from a source that has an identity.<p>To me that would matter, for one when someone is attaching their name - and by extension their reputation - to their words they automatically have something to lose by saying it.<p>Second, it helps to verify that they are real people with relevant experience, instead of posers.<p>Anonymity on the net has its uses, for instance for whistleblowers and to ask embarrassing questions.<p>But for the most part it is used as a shield for cowardly attacks, sockpuppets and to create a persona with a reputation that is larger than the one the person is really entitled to and so on.<p>Being yourself is more than enough. So, to all those that are for whatever reason anonymous here, step out of the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life persona.<p>Anonymous cowards belong to that other site :)
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: It's like clockwork.<p>I'll get HYPER-interested in something, to the point that I can't stop talking about it or thinking about it nonstop. I go through 'buildout' if it's a project, 'level up' if it's a game, or even went down the road of DJing and playing in a band.<p>Each time, after roughly 6 months, I burn out and end up moving on to something new with little desire to pursue my last project.<p>I'm extremely worried about this as I've been working passionately on a new startup idea with some friends and we're nearing the 2 month mark.<p>How can I stay enthusiastic?
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: After running my statup for more than a year (as CEO), I became very tired.<p>Our product is often recognized as a feature, not a whole solution.
We <i>could</i> make this "feature" shine, but for that we needed to spread our solution to millions and millions of website.<p>Besides that, I saw my co-founders getting tired as well. I could cheer them up and show the vision, goals and etc (like a good CEO, right?), like I did in the past, but how can I make that again if <i>I</i> am feeling tired (depressed, maybe?).<p>It really sucks, I enjoy entrepreneurship but it's been more than a year bootstrapping without many customers and real money.<p>I'm thinking now to sum-up what we have in a document and try to sell to other startup who operates in the same field, is well funded and has open positions.<p>So, the questions:<p>1) How to evaluate the system that we developed (lines of code + time on it?).<p>2) Should I also sell the 10 .com domains that I bought?<p>and<p>3) A word document. Is this the best approach? What should it contain more in the document??
Upvote: | 78 |
Title: Google is beginning to phase in over-the-air updates to Android 2.2 / Froyo to Nexus One users on T-Mobile and will continue over the next couple weeks.<p>If you'd like to install it now, instructions are right here. Root access is not required; just download the update, drop it on your SD card, and follow the instructions to start the upgrade: http://phandroid.com/2010/05/22/manually-update-your-nexus-one-to-android-2-2-froyo/<p>For those without a Nexus One on T-Mobile, I've taken several screenshots around the OS and in a few applications. Check them out here if you like, and feel free to ask if you'd like to see something else: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cscotta/sets/72157623991007169/show/<p>The "Chrome to Phone" extension for cloud-to-device messaging is also available here: http://code.google.com/p/chrometophone/<p>Have fun!
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Really, I don't get it. For a few months now everybody on HN, reddit, slashdot, stackoverflow or any other god-damn hacker hangout is talking about how everybody is ripping us off off our privacy. Facebook has been crucified already, maybe they will target google as here on HN I can see people moving to DDG just for the privacy (and not for the excellent programmer friendly results it gives). Every morning I log into HN and see a new article from someone's blog which tells how everyone and their uncle can attain more privacy. We have had privacy scanners and fixers we have had intense discussions on this topic.<p>I read all of this, understand most of it but I could never comprehend the idea of "privacy" online. I always assumed that whatever I put on the internet would be public now or in the future. Come to think of it, I put most of the stuff on internet just so a large mass of the world population can see me. My blog, my twitter, my facebook account all are there just so people who want to find me (or someone like me) can find me easily.<p>Google knows where do I live from my IP, so what? Facebook knows who I am friends with, so what? All this stuff was put up there just to make it public. If I don't want anything to be found I won't put it on the internet. It's not like they would steal my identity by knowing whom do I friend on the internet or what TV shows I like to watch. Nor would it harm me if webmasters know what word I searched to get to there website. All they want to know is what makes people want to come to there website. Where is the harm in it?<p>Maybe most of the people here would develop a deep seeded hatred for this post (maybe for me), but I just need to ask this question. Everyone I like from Cory Doctrow to the HN community wants to talk about something which I don't get. I know its a matter of principle to most of you. But I even can't understand that principle. So can you please explain all the privacy awareness outburst to me (without,preferably, flaming me)?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I've hit a slump and can't get to work. I have a to do list and I'm going to cross out five items before the end of today.<p>What progress are you making?
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: (via zedshaw)
Upvote: | 75 |
Title: I'm curious about others processes for beginning the development of a web app. It's always hard for me to "just dive in" and start, so I'm curious to get some feedback from the community.<p>After you have the initial idea, what's next? Start defining features? Draw up a mockup on a piece of paper? Start writing the DB schema?
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: There have been some interesting discussions here and on Quora (http://www.quora.com/What-companies-teams-are-toxic-on-a-resume) about certain companies not being good for your resume or two much time at one of these companies not being good for your resume.<p>I have no college education so when I first started at Microsoft when I was 22 I decided that I wanted to work there for 5 years and do well (best reviews possible, multiple promotions). I also wanted to spend the time trying to influence Microsoft as an organization to do something interesting in the Linked Data/Semantic Web space. I am now a Senior Engineer and have pioneered the use of data semantics within Bing. This experience feels extremely valuable as I pursue a longer career working with start-ups.<p>I am confident that I will complete my 5 years and meet my goals but I'm interested in better understanding how this experience will be perceived by members of the start-up community that I hope to be a part of in the future.<p>Is it really perceived as a negative to work at an engineering organization like Microsoft? What other things will be valuable to demonstrate on my resume as I look to enter the hacker community more actively?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Hi all,<p>I need your advice; I'm working in an internal IT department at a non-software company which is, as you can guess, far from ideal. I live + work in the UK.<p>I am starting to feel very depressed about my situation and am desperate to find a way out. I've
applied to a job at a decent software company which unfortunately I didn't get (though it certainly gave me an idea of what to improve if I were to apply again, so was positive overall.)<p>I'm working on developing a programming language; it's extremely early days but I have certain convictions about what is important in a language and in the hacker tradition want to make something that fits those convictions.<p>I, much to my regret, don't have a degree in Computer Science (though I do have an engineering degree) - though I grew up loving programming I, for somewhat complicated reasons, ended up choosing the wrong subject.<p>As far as I can see the following steps are the way out. I'd be very grateful for any advice/criticism you care to offer about these steps, also with any suggestions you can offer me in finding a happier coding existence:-<p>+ Work hard on my language project; if I can actually do something with this I will have something very nice to put on my CV. Programming languages, compilers, parsing, etc. are really my passion; they are the one thing I'd like to get into more than anything else.<p>+ Develop knowledge of algorithms, big O, etc. - the kind of stuff I would have picked up on a computer science course, as well as being the kind of stuff asked at interviews.<p>+ Get involved with open source - I am especially interested in LLVM as it ties in nicely with my language project.<p>+ Practice, practice, practice - Practice coding, consciously trying to improve as much as I can.<p>And the most recent, most radical thought:-<p>+ Ditch the idea of going to work on someone else's stuff and get going on a Micro ISV. Keep the day job and work all the hours outside of work to put a product together. I'd like to somehow link this to my passion for programming languages, etc. - perhaps that old programmer startup cliche of a development tool of some kind?<p>Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me, it's really appreciated. Feel free to criticise + tear my ideas apart, by the way! Always happy for (constructive) criticism.<p>(I am using a different HN login from usual for obvious reasons.)
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: Not enough people know this. If you're wary of a bit.ly link from a stranger, just add a "+" to the end. This will take you to a bit.ly page that has the full URL and a list of how many people have clicked it, who's tweeted it and when, etc. Also, if you're sharing a link, you could just add the + yourself to make it a bit less opaque. e.g. this link to Diaspora's Kickstarter page: http://bit.ly/dgpnNs+
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: <<What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?<p>It's a rhetorical question. The answer is patently obvious at this point: Lisp is evil, and you'd damned well better write all your code in C++ and XML and JavaScript and PL*SQL and CSS and XSLT and regular expressions and all those other God-fearing red-blooded manly patriotic all-American languages from now on. No more of this crazy Lisp talk, ya hear?>>
Upvote: | 73 |
Title: I haven't seen a post exclusively for remote jobs. Are you hiring (internships or otherwise) remotely?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: I've been using TextMate for a few years now, but recently have been doing a lot of work in projects that have either 1) a lot of files or 2) really big files. Both of these situations cause TextMate to crawl to a halt.<p>I've used Emacs in the past, but something about the way in which you can navigate code just makes me feel less than efficient in it. Maybe I didn't take enough time to memorize all the required shortcuts. Mastering an editor that can be used over an ssh session certainly seems a plus.<p>So a question to all the coders out there: what editor do you use? Why did you choose it? What are the downsides?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: Recent (sometimes spirited) threads on HN have highlighted the potential risks to angel investing from provisions in the Senate Banking Bill that would have (at least as interpreted in a worst case by the Angel Capital Association):<p>(1) altered the definition of "accredited investor" by increasing the thresholds for an individual from $1 million in net worth or $200K in annual income to about $2.3 million in net worth (excluding value of principal residence) or $450K in annual income; and<p>(2) subjected many Regulation D to filings to SEC review during a mandated 120-day wait period and also opened up such filings to all sorts of new state regulation by removing federal preemption in this area of private placements.<p>These provisions posed a potentially serious risk to startup funding. ACA, for example, estimated that the "accredited investor" changes would cut the number of qualified angel investors by an estimated 77%. Many in the startup community wrote to Senator Dodd and others strongly urging them to fix these provisions.<p>It appears that Senator Dodd has mostly listened. Last week, he joined with Republican Senator Kit Bond to offer a bipartisan amendment to the banking bill that represented a significant compromise on the Regulation D issues.<p>The Bond/Dodd amendment does the following: (1) leaves the definition of "accredited investor" basically unchanged until at least 2014, though the $1 million net worth threshold must now be calculated without including the value of an investor's principal residence; and (2) deletes the 120-wait period and blocks increased state meddling with Regulation D offerings.<p>This news is HUGE for startups. The result is not perfect but, compared to what might have been, this is a significant reprieve for Regulation D that will allow funding deals in the startup world to continue largely unabated and that defeats the deal-killing rules that otherwise might have passed in this bill.<p>I had been looking for a simple reference point on the web where this had been cleanly reported but was unable to find it - hence this post.<p>At this point, the Senate version of the banking bill is as noted above while the House version makes no changes whatever to Regulation D. The good news, then, is that this bill should pass either in the form summarized above or with no changes at all to Regulation D should the above Senate provisions be dropped altogether in conference.<p>I will link to some of the partial reports of this in a comment.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: It seems that RoR, PHP & scala are the "hot" languages for startups. I know that java is old, but it lends itself to better engineering
IMO. Especially in NYC, where there is a robust market for high-
paying java jobs at investment banks, it is hard to find lean
startupers.<p>Are there theoretical or practical reasons to avoid java in lean
startups? Any ideas where to find folks at the intersection of java +
lean startups + NYC or is it hopeless?<p>Many thanks!<p>Cheers,
Mike<p>PS Here is the job description. Applicants and feedback on the
description are welcome too:
http://www.socialfeet.com/2010/05/got-java-chops/
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Disclaimer: Long time HN, written from a new frow-away account.<p>Intro:<p>Almost a year back, I met a (not so close) friend, who like me, quit his job and was looking to strike out on his own. After some "dating" we decided to start a company. I was to write the site and he was to do the bizdev/sales.<p>Half a year later:
The site is up and running. We have invested some of our money and spent months of work on it. And now came the second part. He needed to go out and start getting customers while I continued ironing out the tech parts.<p>Here things started to take a turn. He never truly fails, but constantly gets very average (and below) results. Reading some of the emails he sends and accompanying him to a meeting or two, showed he is far from what I would of wanted.<p>Current state:
- Most of the tech stuff is done
- We are getting traction and sales are starting to come in
- Or deals are pretty lame (compared to a direct competitor who has 10x better deals)<p>While we are slowly growing, I am constantly worried about staying in this business (as this might be my only shot at a venture - savings are running low).<p>Has anyone been in a situation like this ? I would love some advise..<p>EDIT:
To clarify: We have spoken on the issue and he admits he is not doing too well. He has suggested we join hands at sales. Sadly I am not good either. There is nothing else he can do to benefit the company.<p>We both are at the end of our savings, buying each other out is not an option
Upvote: | 77 |
Title: I'm a 20 year old guy who sold his company last month for $5m in cash. I really don't know what to do with the money or how to manage it. I never gave it a thought and now suddenly I have $5m. Hacker News, please help me out. Should I deposit the money? Buy stock? Or what the heck am I supposed to do with it? I am just a regular guy who spends around $3000 a month. I don't buy fancy stuff and now suddenly I have more money than I can ever spend.
Upvote: | 142 |
Title: Cross-posted from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade/comments/c8nji/i_made_an_oil_spill_map_visualizer_tool/<p>Move the oil spill over your hometown to get a better sense of its magnitude.
Upvote: | 113 |
Title: Long-time reader, first-time poster.<p>Thanks to HN and several other forums on the web, I've cobbled together a business that makes me about $5k-7/month. I'm not seeing a whole lot of growth in demand for my product, but one of my sales tools (a twist on a common tool that I faked together in PHP despite having no engineering background) always gets a very positive response and closes me a lot of sales at prices way above typical for products like mine.<p>The space I'm in is a sexy, popular space. Can't say what it is, but lots of people want to work in it.<p>Recently I heard about a prestigious grant contest for businesses in my space and applied. To my pleasant surprise, I've recently learned I'm being awarded $100k specifically to further develop the sales tool I cooked up (sorry for the intentionally vague language) so I can offer it to other businesses in my space who sell products like the one I've been selling.<p>This seems like a pretty good idea. To use an obvious allusion, I've been mining gold with middling success, but while doing so, I unwittingly invented a really kickass shovel. Eventually I learned that my shovels were in fact awesome and now I've got some capital to develop and sell these shovels to other miners at scale so they can make a better go of it.<p>Here's my problem. To really capitalize on this windfall I need someone who can actually hack. I don't know the first thing about creating a web app that scales. Unfortunately, I live in a remote area and there aren't a lot of programmers around here. Furthermore, I've never hired a developer before so I suspect any job posting I put up would be a big turn-off to the sort of person I'd want to work with. I read all the posts on here making fun of bad job listings and they make me really paranoid.<p>Suggestions on how to proceed?<p>Edit: If anyone wants to reach out to me, you can get me at rexfaraday at gmail dot com
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: Stackoverflow: #824
experts-exchange.com: #996
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: I'm an orthopedic surgeon with a PhD in Biomaterials. I have a comfortable financial situation, a beautiful family and basically just work 2 days/week. Besides that, I really miss the challenge of creating something and wish that I had studied CS or engineering (thanks to PG and Woz!).<p>So here is the deal: I want to build a startup in 2-3 years dealing with custom-made prostheses, and I'd like to hack the technical side myself. My problem is education/background in robotics to pull it off.<p>From my initial investigations, I'll need a basic knowledge of mechanics and electronics (nothing fancy, it is basically a solved problem) and a more mature grasp of computer science (possibly some LISP to wrap everything). This is quite a stretch from my technical background (basic Calculus, basic FEA and some Python).<p>Here are my options:
1) Self-study (more targeted and possibly faster; requires self-discipline; no feedback; isolation)
2) Follow a 2-year technical college in mechanics and/or electronics (good practice; requires complementation)
3) Get a 5-year degree in mechanical or computer engineering (nice, but too long; lacks practical side?)
4) Combinations of the above (e.g. drop college after 2 years + self-study)<p>It certainly looks challenging, but my goal is not only making money in a fixed time frame, titles or jobs, but the journey itself. Can I get some advice?
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Yesterday I was inspired by this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383705<p>After reading it I immediately got to work fleshing out the concept and I now have a minimal version live! It includes GitHub (Gist) integration as well as many community-oriented features...<p>The url is: http://readmycode.org<p>Now I need community feedback! What other features would you like to see? What feels rough right now? Design input is appreciated too, as I'm not 100% happy with it now.<p>Many thanks to everyone on HN for making this possible!
Upvote: | 70 |
Title: Since people are still applying, I thought we'd better announce when the application form will be turned off. If you want to apply, do it by tonight at 10 Pacific time. Please don't get your hopes up, though. The odds of a late application getting funded are much lower, and the odds of us funding one this late (the first dinner is on Tuesday) are very low indeed.
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: This is a very curious phenomenon. Same everything, yet vastly different click through rate. Have any of you tried this?
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: The page that features Chrome extensions for web development:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/featured/web_dev
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: I am stuck in a job which I don't find very interesting (but I cannot switch).<p>I am working on a side project (about an hour a day) but still need to spend the whole day at the job.<p>Any advice on how to deal with it during the day ? Anybody been in that situation before ?<p>EDIT 1: The workload isn't much and even though I try to read up on the news and stay current, I still have to be at the workplace for 8 hours to keep up appearances.<p>EDIT 2: I am a software engineer. I cannot switch because of personal reasons (which will probably change next year allowing me to explore a little more). The other reason is I am not learning anything new. It's all stuff I have worked on before (at a much larger scale in a startup): the management team here thinks they are doing something that'll change the world but it's more because of their inexperience than anything else.<p>I do have my side-project which provides an outlet but it doesn't discount the fact that I spend 9 hours a day at something that doesn't get me anywhere.<p>EDIT 3: I did some HN searching and I find myself in a similar situation as :<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1246200<p>I worked for an awesome team a couple of years ago on a great product. I was just out of school and it was a huge project which I thoroughly enjoyed, being the major player. Now I am working in a more crony-based organization where the things we are doing are way behind what I worked on before.<p>I was expecting progress, instead I find my judgement being overruled by less experienced people who haven't shipped any products. Anyhow, thanks for all the advice. I guess it's all about making lemonade out of lemons.
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: I recently read a short blog article talking about the doom of Digg and the final paragraph caught my eye:<p><i>But Digg is in a deadly, unrecoverable tail spin. The fact is, people -- real people -- are beginning to tire. Submit this, upload that, vote on this, "like" that, be my "friend", check in here, suggest this, retweet that ... there's already so much to do. The only thing left to "Digg" is a grave.</i><p>It is, precisely, the simplicity and minimalism of Hacker News' feature set that keeps it usable for everyday, <i>busy</i>, -- real people --. Obviously, the culture on Hacker News keeps submissions and comments in check, but that culture would not exist if HN were trying to become a social network for entrepreneurs.<p>Your continued interaction and consistent fine-tuning makes this a place that I like to come back to. There is a certain social satisfaction with knowing that one is a part of a community in which the creator is still a participant.<p>I know you are cognizant of what makes this community tick; I also realize it wouldn't be what it is today if your intentions hadn't been clear (and they obviously are) - so I didn't <i>need</i> to say this, but I did <i>want</i> to say this: thank you.
Upvote: | 647 |
Title: I built a site that should improve process of hiring on Craiglist. First test results look promising. I plan to pursue couple local HR agencies to give it a try and run couple more tests for other professions. Any other ideas on what is the most effective way to prove or disprove this concept quickly?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I've been throwing around this idea of interviewing startups to learn how the actual systems and processes work behind the scenes. (ie, what do you use to handle billing and how does it tie into everything else? how about customer support?)<p>I put up the second interview today (http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/back-office-exposed-zippykid) and was hoping I could get some feedback from other HN readers.<p>Is this interesting? Any areas you want me to dive particularly deep on?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: Slippy is a HTML Presentation library written with jQuery, it takes a html file in and plays it in any browser.<p>It is optimal for programming-related talks since it includes a syntax highlighter and is very easy to use since it's just standard html markup with a few classes to enable specific functions.
Upvote: | 69 |
Title: I was out to lunch today with a fellow startup CEO who commented that our company (SEOmoz) was likely having a much harder time finding remarkable engineers to hire due to the negative perceptions about SEO as an industry and business practice. In his experience, even very smart, talented people from this background tended to have closed minds on this topic.<p>Since we specifically discussed the Hacker News community, I thought it valuable and worthwhile to post here and see if the community had opinions on the topic and, perhaps, could share ways in which we could help overcome it.<p>My sense is that HN is generally filled with smart, open-minded people who love applying science and technology to marketing (or any other problem), yet SEO (and web marketing as a whole) seems to attract derision, often without context.<p>Love to hear your thoughts.<p>---<p>RE our specific situation: We're hiring primarily for folks to work on our web crawl, processing & machine learning platforms (as well as some front-end applications that plug into these systems). A good comparison would be Google's/Yahoo!'s/MS's teams in the early days working on 50 billion+ page indices, metric construction, crawling, serving, etc. We've heard that these are typically interesting, sexy problems, but that the "SEO" industry bias is working against us.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: I drive about 1 to 1.5 hrs to work lately and am bored with my music and the radio.<p>I'm the one driving so no video. Are there any good audio podcasts out there on web dev, web news, media?
Upvote: | 63 |
Title: full disclosure - I work on Twilio, which I used for this
Upvote: | 132 |
Title: I do a lot of graphic design work. I have over 2,000 fonts. (Yes, I do use them.) Adobe Acrobat routinely takes 10 to 15 minutes (I'm not exaggerating) to open up a PDF file, whether it uses 1, 2, 10, 100 or no fonts at all. According to FileMon from Microsoft, it's because Acrobat loads every single font on my system before rendering the file. This makes no sense--especially because if I were to actually try to use one of those fonts not already embedded in the document by editing the file, it would re-load them all over again.<p>Some time is also spent reading and updating a local MySQL database called the "organizer." I've never used the Acrobat organizer. Not once. I suspect 99.999% of Acrobat users don't even know it's there, yet every time I open a PDF, I wait for it. There's no way to clear it except by manually locating the files it uses on your filesystem and deleting them.<p>Unrelated but equally infuriating: Acrobat insists on printing 100% black rectangles (meaning 0% C, 0% M, 0% Y, 100% K) as a mixture of C M and Y ink on my Xerox Phaser 6180MFP/N color laser printer. Illustrator prints the same exact PDF file properly using only black ink on the same printer.<p>Can someone from Adobe explain to me why this is reasonable? I've paid Adobe thousands of dollars over the year for its products. When can I expect to open a PDF in 2 seconds or less like I could with Acrobat 3.0 on my 100MHz Pentium ten years ago? When will Acrobat actually work?<p>(Before you say, "Use Preview!" know that I've already tried. It doesn't render my PDFs properly. It rasterizes things that shouldn't be rasterized and it draws lines that aren't there. Adobe made the PDF spec, I like PDFs, and I want to use Adobe's software.)
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: Today in my RSS reader I saw a link to the iPhone 4.0 official video and I thought, "Oh boy eye candy!" What I got was a big fat "Download Quicktime to view this video" message. My heart sank. Not because I wasn't going to be able to watch the video on my unsupported Linux platform, but because it was suddenly clear that Steve Job's rejection of proprietary video standards (Flash) was a total load of shit! Who is he to criticize Adobe for promoting a proprietary web video standard and then shove his own proprietary video standard down consumers' throats?
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: Last week, I received an email asking me to remove one of my applications from the App Store, saying that "they had been notified" that the name of my application was infringing on a registered trademark.<p>The name of my application?<p>Facetime. (http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/facetime.html)<p>Specifically, this is what the email said:<p>"We received notice from the trademark owner of FACETIME who has confirmed their ownership of registrations for FACETIME in the US and other countries.<p>Accordingly, please remove your application from the App Store and change the name of your application."
Upvote: | 169 |
Title: See the (short) e-mail exchange for a sad little story; http://craigsworks.com/projects/simpletip/sandbox/emails.txt
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: my situation:<p>I'm 19 years old and I go to a not so great (according to Macleans university rankings) university in Canada. I would like to make a transfer to Waterloo and then go to graduate school at Stanford or MIT. These are just some of the goals that I'd like to achieve in my academic career. I would just like to prove to myself that I have what it takes and I would like to be in that academic environment (Sorry if I worded it poorly).<p>At the moment I know I definitely am not trying as hard as I should..I don't remember the last time I engaged myself with hard problems or where to start. I've been feeling pretty lost in what I've wanted to do with my life so I just decided to follow Paul Grahams advice and just go with what gives me the most options (http://paulgraham.com/hs.html).<p>When it comes to learning new things or building off old concepts, I feel like I have a poor foundation and I just don't know where to start. How can build a great foundation where I can understand the concepts intuitively?<p>In short, how can I become smarter?
Upvote: | 149 |
Title: I would like to know wich things you consider to give you and advantage in any area of life.<p>Some things I would add to the list:<p>1) Program launcher (launchy/quiksilver/gnome-do/katapult/etc) instead of icons<p>2) Vim as an editor (mastering its usage)<p>3) Gesture search in android<p>Not currently using but I want to try:<p>- Polyphasic sleep (perhaps everyman)<p>- Colemak keyboard layout
Upvote: | 81 |
Title: I don't own a Macbook, but when people ask me what they should get it's hard to recommend a good alternative.<p>For every other manufacturer - do the model names and numbers have to be so opaque? They could all cut it down to 5 or 6 well designed, sensibly named models and still sell more units.<p>Whenever a friend is looking for a machine they try and wade through the HP, Dell and Sony websites. Eventually they give up trying to decipher the model names, and whether they should be looking iin "Everyday", "Performance", "Thin & Light" or "Business" categories and end up ordering a Macbook.<p>The HP G62-105SA? The Dell Latitude E5410? HP you also sell the Compaq Presario CQ61-406SA? What are these machines? What the hell is wrong with you?<p>I've owned the 13 inch Dell XPS machines. They were pretty good, but are apparently discontinued.
Upvote: | 236 |
Title: I know that there are a lot of freelancers on this site. I am interested in doing freelance web development but am wondering how to get started. How did you land your initial contracts? If you were just starting out again, how would you go about doing so? How much should you charge starting out?
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: Do a lot of you work in the field or have degrees in business??<p>Whenever there is a discussion on stocks, HFT, economy, a lot of seem to know about it (more then just a wikipedia search or passing interest...which I would say I have)
Upvote: | 112 |
Title: Whenever I'm tired, but can't sleep, I take a cold shower. It snaps me awake. Then tiredness sets in quickly: such is the <i>rate change</i> of tiredness, I seem to go straight though the sleep barrier...usually in a few minutes (presumably).<p>It's not statistically significant yet, but it's worked about four out of four times now.
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: When my login cookie is set I can't read anything, but if I delete it then I can. Is there currently a problem? It seems to have been so for an hour or more.<p>Current time 15:50 Zulu.
Upvote: | 53 |
Title: So this may seem like a simple question, but how did you find the company you are working at now? I've been using: crunchbase, linkedin, reading techcrunch, etc as well as a ton of coffees, beers, 'career advice' meetings. Every time I find a company I go through an extensive search of who works there, what they do, what the demand is for their product, etc. This helps for discovery, but of course will inevitably help during the interview.<p>I know there are many companies that I am still missing. Is there a service out there (not recruiters) that can play matchmaker with the characteristics that I am looking for in a company?
Upvote: | 44 |
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