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arienon How to Be a Better Entrepreneur in the Next 30 Minutes

My PC wallpaper says: "Don't be stupid. Do your work".

Straight to the point, just wonderful :)

arienon Wolfram Alpha Fails the Cool Test

So something new comes up, and people just want to beat it to the ground, over and over. I guess that's the only thing that sells, lately ¬_¬

arienon Most and Least Affordable Cities To Live In

Well, it's one more thing to worry about. Consider someone dropping their day job to work full time on their newly created startup. Every bit helps to save costs, which means less stress and a more enjoyable adventure.

However, are these affordable cities "at the end of the world"? I mean, incomunicated and such. I'm not American, so I can't really tell from checking the list. In that case it might end up being a burden if you don't like travelling.

But looking positively again, it could be a good opportunity to start small groups of hackers in places where there aren't any and help each other out :)

arienon Microsoft's Anti-Mac Ads Are Starting To Work

Being an European (albeit probably not the standard one), I don't really sense the "cheapness". The ad to me is just saying: "why pay more if you can get something that does what you want for a lot less?" (which I agree on, and it's basically the reason I don't own a Mac).

The issue as I see it, is more about being practical and not just falling for trends or overpriced quality. It's like buying expensive branded clothes or non-branded ones. Is someone who doesn't buy Nike, Versace, Gucci, whatever brands being cheap or simply being consequent with their real needs?

arienon Early look a Wolfram Alpha

Works again (well, on and off :/ ). I've found a "too many connections" error once so far, the rest of the time it worked smoothly :)

arienon Why We Procrastinate and How to Stop

I don't think it's that hard. But I did notice that I could give an almost immediate answer the question "An example of a bird is ______", whereas my first reaction to "A bird is an example of ____" was "uff" and just kept on reading the article.

Then I read your comment and I thought, is it really hard? And then I actually tried to get an answer. It was even easier than the first one (I just said "animal" :P).

So I think the article does have a point. It's not that it's harder, our brain's initial reaction makes it look hard. And maybe it's because it's easier to process and deliver concrete information rather than vague or abstract.

On a side note, I wonder if these two questions asked to little kids instead of students would have different results...

arienon Ask HN: How old were you when you got your first computer?

I got my first computer as Xmas gift when I was 7 years old. I read some sci-fi magazine and I soooo wanted a robot... But my mom told me they didn't have house-robots yet, so I asked for a computer instead. And I got it! A shiny Commodore 64, with the cassette and such. It took ages to load programs, and then most of the time they didn't work :)

arienon Ask HN: What's the most easy-to-learn framework?

Taken from that same page: "Note: CodeIgniter will run on PHP 5. It simply does not take advantage of any native features that are only available in that version."

So, it does run on PHP5, just doesn't use PHP5 only features for the sake of backwards compatibility. For PHP5 one can use KohanaPHP, as mentioned by another comment :)

arienon Why is it that as we age, time seems to race along?

A bit offtopic maybe, but there's a nice short story from Stephen King about this time perception phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Pretty_Pony

arienon Atlassian Confluence $5 for 5 users

I didn't even notice the "5 days" part until my boyfriend pointed it out. And even then it sounded odd, since it says they give you a year of full support.

A quick reading of the FAQ (which you should always do to avoid surprises :)) clears up all doubt.

BTW, thanks to the submitter. We use this at work and it's fantastic. I really wanted to be able to use it for my personal projects, too!

arienon Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional for unemployed developers

Well, at least in my country (and I bet in most), unemployed people get a "salary" from the government (according to how much they've worked previously) and they have access to free courses and some benefits to help them while they are looking for their next job. The courses are meant to help them learn or refresh skills they might need for future jobs.

How is this different? :)

arienon Ask HN: Domain name searching

I agree, it's amazing. I found some awesome domains with it.

arienon Shouttr: Tweet it out loud

For the slow or sleepy: yes, it's April's Fool :P

arienon Key to FMyLife's Success?

That was exactly my point.

Besides that, to make sure I wasn't crazy, I checked some chat logs I had. I did send some FML links to a friend on Jan 14th, so the domain was registered at least 4 days before the date mentioned. In that case, maybe it could have been simply re-registered, as sho mentioned.

arienon Key to FMyLife's Success?

Are you sure that's the correct registration date? I recall visiting that site last year... Or maybe it was in January after all.. Not sure now :/

arienon YouTube Adds A Twitter Button

And it's not. Seriously, this last week I've seen that silly whale page way too often.

arienon Poll: Where are you from?

Yep! I'm from Barcelona, Spain :)

arienon How to Write Fast Code

This is the kind of advice that points at something so obvious that you really never thought about it and feel silly once someone points it out :)

arienon PC sales rise, Mac sales decline. Blame marketing?

Here they go for 100€ if you sign up for a mobile internet connection. They are advertised in all phone shops, so most likely everybody has heard about them. And yeah, probably the sales increase comes basically from these devices.

About needing a real PC... Does the "average individual" really need one? :)

arienon PC sales rise, Mac sales decline. Blame marketing?

Hm, I'd say the Apple brand awareness is very high (at least in my country), so for me they don't fail on the marketing department.

I think it's probably just a matter of price. At least that's what used to keep me away from Apple... Until I met the hardcore fanbase. Nowadays they are the ones that keep me away from Apple. Hmm... maybe it's marketing, after all :P

Anyway, it was also important that I couldn't run key apps (read: games) in a Mac and I could on a PC. And sure, I could run Windows on a Mac, but if I'm going to use Windows (or Linux, whatever), why can't I just go for a PC and save money for something else? :)

arienon Ask HN: Recommendations for website monitoring tools

You could try something like Nagios: http://www.nagios.org/. It's not a remote service, you have to install and configure it, but it's wonderful.

arienon Why HN is slow lately

I see people took the Erlang suggestion seriously :P

But I wonder, isn't it a bit silly.. I mean, new people will read this post and find out your evil plans to kic.. err, gracefully lead them out :)

arienon Advice for SW entrepreneurs: The Great Startup Idea that I Can't Reveal (Yet)

Well, since ideas can be patented, trademarked, become intellectual property and whatever else, it's understandable that we feel scared about ideas being stolen.

But I think the roots of the problem are basically in our enthusiasm and our (lack of) self-confidence. On one side, we consider our ideas awesome and that anyone who hears them will also think they are the coolest thing since sliced bread. On the other hand, we believe that, if they like it enough (which they obviously do because of the previous point), they will steal/copy it and possibly execute it better than us (because they have more experience, more people, more contacts, more money... infinite reasons).

This article speaks the truth, 99% of the time people won't care or understand, and you will have to chase them to make them believe in your ideas (I'm experienced with the "that's interesting" people :P). But when enthusiasm is strong enough, it's very hard to accept that someone won't like your idea. And if self-confidence levels are low, here comes the problem and the secretive attitude.

arienon Introducing expandable ads on AdSense sites

They still have those annoying ads that make sound on mouseover. They should apply this click policy on these as well. Most annoying banners ever!

arienon HIV Mutates to Death With New Drug

I would get ready for anything. Reality surpases fiction :)

arienon Nokia's Skype-based end run around its operator partners

Maybe they should just make their own network.

Anyway, if it's possible to install Skype on these phones, even if it doesn't come preinstalled it won't matter much, people will do it anyway.

arienon Twitter to begin charging brands for commercial use

'If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.'

This is kind of ironic. You are in internet as a company to make business, but you don't want to use paid services yourself. How do you expect companies to make money if people isn't willing to pay? What makes you think that they will pay your service, if they don't want to pay for e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc?

Obviously Dell would be a bad example here since they sell hardware, but I think this could apply to a lot of internet companies/start ups.

arienon Applications open for summer 2009 YC funding

Woops, I actually read that FAQ a long time ago, guess I forgot about it... Thank you :)

arienon Applications open for summer 2009 YC funding

Are applications from outside America accepted? How are they handled if they were selected?

I'm somewhat new to the YC funding process, not sure if I can find this info somewhere (a link would be appreciated if that's the case).

Thank you!

arienon Getting Started with Django and Python - First Impressions

I use it under Windows for testing purposes. Maybe it's not as optimal, but I haven't found any problems yet.