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Ask HN: Should I take the “sponsorship” deal?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324365Quick background: for the past 2 years I've been working on a project, a mobile app (Google me if you'd like to see it for yourself, I don't want this post to be an ad). It recently got a considerable amount of traction. My next step for the product requires a few extra hands on deck and I need money for that.So far I was reluctant to talk to VCs, because I'd lose some control and I'd have to deal with all the stuff I don't want to (incorporating, papers, lawyers, etc.) instead of working on the product. So I came with an idea: since the app's is a _bit_ hot right now and it has to do with finance a bit, I'd look around for a bank which would be willing to pay for the development in exchange for my project helping them strengthen the image of a bank that understands mobile and new technologies. I'd brand the app a little (splashscreen, link to their mobile app in the menu and a few extra sponsored features), I'd mention them whenever I talk to the media. So I contacted a few banks, metSep 16, 2014 1:32 PM
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Ask HN: The Future of Classic Mac Emulatorshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8322576Shapeshifter and Basilisk II have gotten long in the tooth. Compiled for Windows 2000 and under, using old GTK libraries, and being hard to get to work. I am sure the 68K and PowerPC Emulation part works, but the API calls and libraries used on the host operating system need updating.http://basilisk.cebix.net/http://shapeshifter.cebix.net/For example the Network and CD driver does not work in 64 bit Windows, you need to do TUN/TAP to get networking to work. It is very complex either you run a 32 bit Windows box, or an old version of Windows with an outdated GTK library or you struggle to try and make it work with a modern Windows system and have to avoid using the Network and CD drivers.I think maybe the Mac Emulation stuff can be added to the MESS or QEMU projects if the source code is still available for ShapeShifter and Basilisk II. The websites that used to host it went dark and some other people are rehosting it but may or may not have all the files and source code.The Amiga 68K ESep 16, 2014 1:28 AM
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Ask HN: Students unaware/apathetic about Linux group at college; how do we grow?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582662I attend UT Dallas, which isn't a major college by any means but it is one of the largest public colleges in the DFW metroplex which has a lot of tech talent around it and has potential for even more (both the college and area).We have a Linux user group (lug.utdallas.edu) and it is a struggle to get people involved. Personally I can't imagine being involved in tech without being interested/involved in open source stuff; it is kind of the whole point to me. But that does not seem to be the case for a lot of the students who are there for the degree and to get out of there (which is fine and dandy on its own). In the last three months we have had a Steam meeting, a cryptocurrency meeting, and Amazon came and presented AWS; each with varying degrees of success, but not overwhelmingly.I envy colleges like MIT or Stanford that have a proud history of a tech/startup/open source culture on campus. Is there something that our Linux user group can do to foster something similar?Thanks.Apr 13, 2014 7:45 PM
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First month sales of USD5k, how do we keep growing?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7334373My wife and I recently launched a home decor website where we sell unique, hand crafted home design products, such as tables, rugs, throws, ceramics and so on, sourced from traditional craft makers in Morocco, Kashmir and more.We have 11 customers in our first month, sales of over USD5k, and 30% of customers came back to make second purchases. In short: those who saw our products really liked us; those who bought them liked them even more and came back for seconds. We have some good insights into why people like us as well -- 1) our taste (vibrant colours; useful stuff; high quality materials; fits with modern decor); 2) our trust factor (we check everything ourselves, get them from source, and founders are highly credible - IVY league, etc., and 3) stories- our products each have unique stories, invoking a strong emotional reaction.The way we got these 11 customers is an exhibition we threw at our place, and some random/chance meetings with customers at friends' parties.The problem/chMar 3, 2014 3:53 PM
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Satanists release dox cakehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281771Apparently, Satanists have released a magazine and in this magazine they have doxed the following people/groups:Bernard McGuirk (said satanists need to be shot) Gary James (restaurant owner in news for not serving gays) The WBC (westboro baptist church) The Vatican (the fucking vatican)Edit: Theres also some stuff about i2p.Feb 22, 2014 11:27 AM
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She survived a standoff with a gunman — could you?http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6a8d70b6c42046e1b25896ba500a179b&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2014%2F02%2F22%2Fus%2Ftuff-survivor-gunman%2F&c=2940746090834866521&mkt=en-usAntoinette Tuff’s knees tremble as she stares at the black barrel of an AK-47. Her hands shake so much she can’t hold a pencil. Facing her, a stocky young man dressed in black points the assault rifle ...Feb 22, 2014 6:17 AM
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Ask HN: What technology should I use for my new project?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4955871Question for my super geeky HN Friends:I'm building an app. At a very high level, it will be an Android app that pulls and sends some JSON for a picture-rating system. I expect this to scale quite a bit and may become very popular. Given that option I am thinking I want the best technology for the job, even if it's something I don't know and will have to learn. Here are the options I'm considering:Node.js service Asp.Net Service PHP scriptDatabase:Most likely MySQL or MS-SQL.My question is, what do you guys suggest? I know that NO-SQL stuff is all the craze right now, but I don't feel really comfortable with keeping a lot of data in one of these stores without knowing a lot about them. I have extensive experience with MySQL and MS-SQL and trust both of them can do the job great.The interface on the other hand is much more open. It's just going to be pushing text (images will be hosted on S3) so anything that serves text quickly will work. Heavily leaning towards Node.JS for this, but IDec 22, 2012 5:34 AM
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Ask HN: An introspective look at programming skillshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4903342The below is an extract from "The Art of Learning" by Josh Waitzkin"""" It is very important for athletes to do this kind of visualization work, in a form appropriate to their discipline, but often when we are caught up in the intense routine of training and competition, it feels like we have no time for the internal stuff. I know this quite well. Sometimes when I am in the heat of tournament preparation, months will pass with brutal sparring, constant pain, hitting the mats hundreds of times a night while drilling throws, and then I’ll realize that I’ve moved a bit away from what really makes things tick. Then I’ll spend a week doing soft, quiet work on timing, perception, reading and controlling my opponent’s breath patterns and internal blinks, subtle unbalancing touches that set up the dramatic throws that ultimately steal the spotlight. After these periods of reflection, I’ll almost invariably have a leap in ability because my new physical skills are supercharged by becoming integDec 11, 2012 6:26 AM
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Invalidate this startup idea - 500 dollar prototypehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879556I had an idea based on my many conversations with non techies with web or mobile app based ideas. It seems they always spend way too much on building their idea from scratch, even if they use offshore resources OR they forgo it completely as it is too hard to manage.I've lost track of the amount of times I've put palm to forehead when I listen to a non-techie tell me how they spent thousands building their idea from scratch, when they could have used using that was already build - like a wordpress plugin, a rails or django clone with some extra work, or goodness knows what else. But they never even thought to ask around about other avenues.So here is the idea - A proposer (a non techie type) posts their idea, and a bunch of technically savvy hacker news types propose ways to build the prototype for 500 or less, and people up/down vote stuff like stackexchange. Perhaps use crowdsourcing for others to up/down vote the proposals. The winning proposal wins and builds it for 500, minus a noDec 6, 2012 12:39 AM
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Ask HN: I am 23. What's next?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3109773There are times when I find myself at work blazing away at development or outside training for a race and stop to ask myself, is this is it. Not like is this what I am doing for the rest of my life, but the more general question of is this what people work towards all their life. Now I am being a bit vague here, but hear me out and let me explain. It helps to have some background on my story so hold on...I grew up by the city in the suburbs where you had your typical gang per neighborhood and cops cruising around the area at all times. Drug deals were a regular thing during class time and it was likely that if you followed in your parents footsteps you would be pregnant at 17 and potentially graduating high school with a drug problem. Most of my friends fell victim to drugs in one form or another, so I learned to steer clear of most of that stuff. Plus my dad told me he would kill me if he ever found out (little did I know he had his own problem with it all).My parents split apart, butOct 14, 2011 3:16 AM
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Why Cork Is the Most Amazing Material in the World to Keep Your Wine Tastyhttp://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6a88c50f0d154816bd5f6c6310b556ca&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2Fwhy-cork-is-the-most-amazing-material-in-the-world-to-k-5837079&c=5508883383522759810&mkt=en-usThere’s a reason the screw cap hasn’t dominated the wine stopper industry: Cork still kicks the ass of stamped aluminum for the good stuff-and not just for nostalgia’s sake. This is what keeps our ...Sep 5, 2011 9:00 AM
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Ask HN: How scared should a new grad be of the possible economic downturn?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2853669I am a foreign student who graduated last fall with a ML/ NLP heavy MS from a top 5 CS school.I have been trying to do build my own thing, but against my research advisor's advise I was working alone, and things did not turn out that well. Also I have not started looking for jobs, and am a bit lethargic to do so.I have six more months left before I need to get a full-time job (visa regulations). Should I get shit-scared and start looking for one right away. Or can I wait a little longer. My friends tell me that there is a big hiring boom in general in SV, and even in the worst of economic times (2008-09), tech hiring did not ease substantially. I am not sure if that would be true, especially in the startup world.So what is HN's advise?Background: I have never worked in the industry, but have published a couple of research papers, and have created some real user facing, moderately popular stuff, while in the university.Aug 6, 2011 12:04 PM
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My Latest Weekend Project Opinions Wantedhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801888Over the weekend I developed a little webapp (http://www.splashactive.com) that allows you to search for and add activities in a given area. The idea being that you could find new things to do in your area, plan a weekend away (Stag/Hen kind of thing) and companies the organise these activities could add them to the site for free.I'm aiming for sporty kind of activities rather than night clubs/shopping centre kind of stuff. I want something that get people out and active.The reason I started this is I like to always try different things and am always looking for something new to do of a weekend and something like this would be perfect for me. I did a bit of searching and although there were some pages on activities in a particular town nothing seemed to be putting all locations in one easy to use place.Its a bit scrappy at the minute with plenty of cross browser issues and css/mapping bugs but I'm keen to get other peoples opinions before I take it too much further.For those interestedJul 25, 2011 9:08 AM
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Ask HN: Do I hate web development or do I just need a switch-up?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2562535I'm trying to decide whether I can do this forever and I need to know a couple things: whether my situation is industry-typical and if so, will I eventually get used to it. First, a little background: I've loved computers ever since I was a kid. I've always loved learning new stuff and I've made some pretty cool side projects. Somehow, I never even considered the job aspect of it until a couple years ago. I guess I was too busy enjoying it to realize it was a viable career. Anyway.I've been working at a web agency for almost a year now, I'm in some gray area between intern and developer (in that I get paid as an intern but work on full projects without supervision like a developer), and I'm starting to learn that the challenging parts of it aren't what I thought they'd be. Having some difficult task that requires learning a new way to do things isn't a problem -- it's why I fell in love with computers in the first place. I've learned in the past few months that the hardest part is sittMay 19, 2011 1:21 AM
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Ask HN: Life advice - failure with college? Aspiring CS Maj.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2361396First - thank you for even clicking on this and attempting to read and help me. I understand this is a long post, but I would really value your input as a human being and a member ofThis is a very touchy subject for me - as I have not talked about this with anyone. The best place to start is the beginning I guess. I would think that the first part is what most of the HN community can share as a common quality.====background===Ever since I had a computer in my hands (10-11 yrs) I have tinkered around with everything I could. Starting with simple things like HTML - basic copying and editing to make stuff portray the information I wanted - even though it was very bland. The next hurtle for me was the arrival of cable internet - being able to not wait 30 minutes to download a 2 mb file seemed unreal. Getting the router set up for all the computers and setting up sharing and local games of quake III arena with my dad seemed like such a daunting task until completed.Then 16 came and the abilMar 23, 2011 8:50 PM
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Ask HN: evaluating project ideas, how do you do it?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2343828I've read some articles in the past days about idea verification before diving into it. I think that nails the problem I have when building stuff - it looks like it might be useful for someone to pay for it, but I don't really know. I've given up on "build it and they will come" model because there's simply no time to execute false ideas while maintaining a full time job.My last app is youtube -> mp3 converter, I've spent 3 weeks of midnight grinding building a python powered backend server on top of ffmpeg and another ~2 weeks building the frontend website. Launched in mid Jan it now has very few subscribers, adsense rev. was laughable so I took it off completely. Should I have known how hard it was to gain search engine rankings, how unwilling users are to pay for such service - doubt I'd do that again. But I did not verify it, I simply hoped there's still room in this space (well, maybe I'm just doing it wrong, who knows). How could have I verified it?My next idea is to build a selfMar 19, 2011 3:39 PM
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Tales from a non-Chinese Gold Sellerhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318130Posting this on behalf of a friend who's too busy gold farming to make an account of her own:As many of you know, I endured the banhammer on my main WoW account. I'm as bitter as anyone would be, but not because of all the time I lost. I can get mounts, titles, pets, gear and all of my 80s back within time. I think what I'm the most bitter about is how Blizzard went about this and how I have to basically bend over and take it in the rear constantly from this company.I know gold selling is a bannable offense. It's stated in the ToS, it's stated (sometimes) when you log in. I knew it would happen eventually- but not like this.After over 10 emails exchanged with the account admins, I was replied consistently with the same copy/paste format each time until I guess I annoyed them enough and it was taken up by a supervisor. I am still awaiting a reply.After reading hundreds of forum posts, threads, and the like- people are getting banned for the dumbest stuff when it comes to gold. A guild bMar 13, 2011 2:35 AM
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How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of codehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222522Hello Hacker News,I’ve been reading HN for a long time now and love the way the community shares thoughts with each other. I haven’t done anything extraordinary or extremely successful, but I want to chip in to the community with this experience that I find pretty interesting.A year ago, I moved to San Francisco from rural Missouri hoping to join the start-up world. At the same time, I met a friend, Zac, who also just moved to the bay area around that time but had left his job to pursue something more interesting. We decided to become partners and start hacking stuff together.Since we were new to the city and we didn’t know any one, we decided to build a mobile app that lets people use their phone to read the profiles of others nearby. It was supposed to help people “break the ice” and meet new people. This was our first startup. We coded the product in a week and pushed the product live.Once live, we got like 5 users, since no one really knew about it. To promote this product, we deciFeb 15, 2011 6:32 PM
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HTC Gratia review: Body doublehttp://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6a8db5f9306d421c920cc568c143d005&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gsmarena.com%2Fhtc_gratia-review-552p2.php&c=8428441977604616117&mkt=en-usThe HTC Gratia comes in a plain looking box with standard issue stuffing. There’s a microUSB cable in there, a one-piece headset and a very sleek charger. The microUSB cable is used for both data ...Jan 6, 2011 4:00 PM
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Ask HN: How do I plug myself into the Hacker community?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908723Hi all,I'm 25 years old and have been writing software since I was 12. While growing up I never did have any close friends that were as enthusiastic and passionate about programming as I am. All of my friends were into football. So, while we'd sit at our high school lunch tables and talk about football players, I would most likely be day dreaming about what my next weekend programming project would be or why my Diablo hack was causing the game to crash - the real fun stuff.Anyways, I did Computer Science in College and went to a heavy commuter University in North Dallas. Nobody there seemed to really care about programming, either. I'd ask group members and classmates about any cool things they've programmed and most would look at me like I'm crazy. Some didn't even want to go into a computer science job after college, either!I'm now at my second programming-related job. I worked at Nortel for a year and then we all know what happened to them. I now work at a 6 person company, as one oNov 16, 2010 1:39 AM
