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edbon Xiki: The Command Revolution

Yes, me too. Sounds like creator wants to get on top of it and clean all that up, so I hope this kickstarter succeeds. Great project and I want sublime support! :) Backed.

edbon [dead]

Bet you want to click that blue button, right? Impressive example that illustrates the point. :)

edbon Commit Driven Development

This is EXACTLY what an integration test gives you, start there and let it drive your commit message instead, no need for a new mantra.

edbon Ask HN: Outliner templates for building a startup

Good point, I'm more interested in "Things I need to think about" right now though. I guess I'll research 'how to write a business plan' a bit more.

edbon Ask HN: Outliner templates for building a startup

Thanks!

edbon Ask HN: Outliner templates for building a startup

And just to get the ball rolling; I'll start with my first draft at my business planning outline I ended up with after a brainstorming session :

    - Product Development
      - Features
      - Bugs
      - Design
        - Feedback
        - Direction
    - Marketing
      - Launch
      - Viral Component
      - Incentivize referrals / Customer Acquisition
    - Business
      - Raise Money
      - Monetize
    - Brain Dump

edbon Chapter 6 of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book

this is a bad thing?

edbon Ask HN: As an employer, what do you wish applicants did more often?

This also highlights the point that it is important as an employer to write good job descriptions as well. I find this point often neglected.

edbon Escher's "Ascending and Descending" in Lego

Let's say I need 100 grey colored bricks, for example. Where can one order lego pieces on a per-piece basis?

edbon MBA vs Startup: Which should I choose?

This is like asking on reddit if reddit.com or nytimes.com is a better source of news.

edbon Django Debug Toolbar Screencast

My guess is it's a Django Reinhardt song. :)

edbon Hackers and Caffeine

Basically, it turns out there's more 21-35 year olds on the internet who are hopped up enough on caffeine to answer the survey they ran into while browsing the internet. Consequently, I feel almost any survey done on the internet in this fashion will include this distribution of respondents.

edbon Ask HN: What is the preferred cheap host (for low bandwidth sites)?

If you're canadian, or from quebec in particular http://globecite.com and http://www.hosting-canada.ca/ are really good and have good support. I think they're run by the same company, and they're not going anywhere.

edbon Why I’ll Never Be A ‘Web Guy’

The reason most people want to program for the web is that they’re not smart enough to do anything else.

said the guy who just finished saying it's too hard to program without an IDE that has a good debugger.

This guy also thinks HTML==web programming...

edbon Radiohead Says No More Albums

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and I have respect for yours. That being said, the idea of anyone not being able to enjoy radiohead makes me sad. Give them another try! :)

edbon Music to Hack to: Nintendo Mixtape

Like with anything, creativity can spawn some really good 8-bit music that isn't only re-hashed zelda tunes. For a good starting point, have a look at that documentary I posted in the comments, I used to think it was just "living in the past" until I watched it and looked up some of the music.

edit: I'll include the link again for the lazy: http://www.vimeo.com/3734864

edbon Music to Hack to: Nintendo Mixtape

Y'all should watch this video : http://www.vimeo.com/3734864 . It's an excellent documentary on the chiptune scene. Do a search on vimeo for part 2 and watch it before someone pulls it off.

edbon Ask HN: Anyone moved outside of the US to bootstrap your business?

Correction: No, not essential but someone will eventually treat you like shit because you don't speak french, and it's going to be offensive and feel like overt racism, but it'll happen rarely. </rant>

edbon Ask HN: Anyone moved outside of the US to bootstrap your business?

It's Montreal for 1 bedroom, 1 kitchen, 1 livingroom and a bathroom.

edbon Ask HN: What service do you use for personal file backup?

Jungledisk! It allows you to store all yor data on your s3 account

edbon Hey PHP guys... OOP question

You should use the latter but pass it through the __() function. Read the docs on I internationalisation. There is a pretty standard way of translating text in cake

edbon Reading list for those who love to learn

Ah, blow me (and I say that in the friendliest way possible :). I'm of the personal (key word) opinion that Vonnegut NEEDS to be on anybody's learning list. The point, however, is that people who love to learn need nothing more than a heightened sense of curiosity, not some bullshit reading list that attempts to validate how smart they are.

edbon Ask HN: How to stay focused?

I had this very problem and what I did was use the Emergent Task Timer. Now, I know this sounds like lifehacker fluff, but it really worked for me. I used this:

http://davidseah.com/tools/ett/alpha/

Save it to your desktop and what you do is this, write 4-5 tasks you want to complete, and make sure you can hear the beep every 15 mins.

What I do is work on something, if I hear the beep and I'm still working, I keep going. If I hear the beep and I'm not working on said task, I go in to ETT and write what I did over the past 15-30-45-60 minutes. Make sure to put an entry for "IM", "Email", "Telephone","Bathroom" and "Food".

What happened is that when I started using it, I realized I only did about 2-3 hours of productive work a day. It took me a few months to push that up to about 7-8 in an 8-10 hour work day, but you get there by keeping track of how much actual work you do in a day.

Slimtimer.com also works well to this effect. Basically, just take the time to count where every minute goes. You'll soon identify where your focus is going instead of your project and be able to fix it.

Closing IM was key for me. :)

edbon [dead]

but since we're both busy and pretty satisfied with the arrangement that hasn't happened I guess.

I hate to break it to you, but you're in a relationship. Try sleeping with someone else, you'll see what I mean. :)

edbon Ask HN: Review my startup, Droplink for OS X

In my opinion, it should be something closer to 2 weeks. I send alot of emails that don't get checked within 24 hours.

edbon Ask HN: Review my startup, Droplink for OS X

The important questions here are:

1) What's my file limit?

2) How long are files kept for?

edbon How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage

You need to be moderately technical to answer alot of the questions we were getting. In our case, the people who were good on the phone wanted to do more. They couldn't because of the call/email volume and they ended up leaving.

Again, this isn't the whole story. I'm being a little dramatic here so that the story isn't all that boring, but it's essentially what happened. It's probably a good idea for a lot of people. For me, however, it really took all the fun and all my passion out of my company.

edbon How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage

True story (in a nutshell): I was running a hosting company with a friend of mine. Things were good, our sales were increasing to the point where we quit our jobs to grow the company.

It was a good life. Wake up, set your own hours, do some programming on the site and automation tools, take a mental break to communicate with users via email. All in our boxers. Our friends would call us to go out, one of us could handle the emails while the other was out, or hell, we would both leave, so long as people got a reply within 6 hours, everybody seemed to be happy.

Life was good, we were both getting laid and our apartments were clean. Every now and then, a customer here and there wouldn't get it and would request a phone call. We gladly called them up, and fixed in 30 mins what normally would take us 7-10 days of back and forth emailing!

This gratification encouraged us to put our number on our webpage. We did, and closed many sales over the phone. Our sales tripled, our company grew more. we were both earning 50k/year in profits compared to last year's 20, and growing more than linearly.

What happened next? The calls grew more frequent. We would leave them to answering machine and when we would call back, the customers would be angry. Eventually customers called us out on the fact that we only answered calls as of 11:00am and they made us feel guilty about not having a phone answered during business hours.

So we conceded. 9am - 6pm our lines would be answered. After all, we owe it to the customers who brought us our livelihood. 2 guys splitting the task; it was maintainable. All of a sudden though, we couldn't work when we wanted. We had to be up and in the office at 9.

We tried maintaining our lifestyles, coding killer features until 4am, going out when our friends would call us. Eventually there were consequences for these actions.

Gone were the days of coding in our underwear, gone were the haphazard productivity blitzes, gone were the days of our startup's spirit. We lost sleep because we had to be up at 8. Lots of it. If one of us would sleep in, the other would cover until eventually the person waking up early more often would fall to resentment.

Our product suffered, our relationship suffered, our productivity blitzes? Gone. We were canceling plans with friends because we had work to do at night that couldn't get done cause we were on the phone. Nobody would outsource our calls, most of our clients spoke french. Our website hadn't changed graphic design since we put our winter theme up. It was july and our logo was covered in snow. Our phone staff kept quitting. Our sales plateaued. We even started wearing pants. I eventually sold my half.

Trust me kids, don't put your number on your homepage. Stick to email support and get by. Find a way to get by without a filing cabinet and go travel the world while working.

edbon Ask HN: What web framework(s) do you guys use?

I'm a cakePHP user. It has gotten and keeps getting a lot better as of recent, and I really like the community. I looked into codeigniter after using cakephp for a while and it just seemed to have a lot less to offer. I tried symfony too and it seemed alot more complex, unnecessarily so.

I'm currently dabbling in Rails and Django, but am going to put them down until I finish my current project, since there's nothing in either that I can't do in cake, as far as my project's requirements go.

These are also a lot less portable than the PHP frameworks, which I find is a big deal if ever you want to lengthen your runway with client work. It's MUCH harder to get a quick 2-5k on a small webpage when the client hears "change hosting".

edbon Ask HN: How do I find out if I'm infringing copyrights?

good suggestion. Thanks!