fooandbarify

EDIT: Sorry, didn't notice your response below.

I am picky about language and grammar to the point of obsession, yet I would not think twice about using a contraction in my domain name (if it felt better) nor would I be concerned about omitting an apostrophe. I don't think you should either :)

When it comes to diagrams, though, nothing beats pen and paper. I have long given up any hope of finding them later, though - all but the most important diagrams are destined for the recycling bin from the get-go. That's an approach I picked up from the 37signals blog or one of their presentations somewhere, and I highly recommend it. I no longer worry about making it legible or easy to understand, I just dump my ideas onto the page. For extremely important diagrams, I suppose I could then scan it before throwing the hard copy away, but I can't remember ever doing that. In the context of web development, sketched diagrams have always been a short term intermediate step for me - my code may not be as clear or well-documented as it should be (I try!) but it's still more obvious and less hassle than my chicken-scratch diagrams.

If that was really one of the major motivators here, I think it's super cool and it makes me respect the decision a lot more. Still, it must be nice to have that much leverage - seems like this guy could literally make just about anything and sell it to AOL.

If you really wanted it to work: In my opinion the best way for something like this to gain traction would be to start small and make it exclusive. Make yourself the gatekeeper to a startup marketing nirvana rather than driving a race to the bottom. Play matchmaker with hot startups (taking a commission of course) - perhaps one of the niche app hosts want to pair up with a popular new domain name generator, or maybe you can find the next set of games to sell as a bundle. It sounds like a lot of work (and I'm sure that it would be) but the fact is that startups already have too many ways to find each other - a much more valuable proposition is someone willing to do the legwork. If you are able to generate enough interest in what you're doing, automating it and making it public might become an option in the future.

tl;dr I don't think hackers understand the value of what you're suggesting, even though I think it's valuable. Create demand and prove your method first.

Thanks.

When I'm ready to ship my next project, I would definitely use a site like this if it existed.

Thanks!

That's a cool idea. On of the easiest that comes to mind would be chopping Photoshop files for Wordpress themes or HTML/CSS templates - it might seem somewhat daunting but if you gave her a starting point she would basically just have to cut and paste into the right parts a lot of the time. Even though there are tons of people already doing it I suspect that finding and partnering with a good designer would still be quite profitable. Depending on her English skills, another option would be getting into SEO - there's still a lot of room for growth in that market and the technical requirements can sometimes be fairly minimal. Copywriting might be an applicable related field, whether in her native language or by offering translation services from English to her native language (obviously depends on her English reading and what her native language is).

she's a financial director [I dunno what they call this position] in the biggest company in the city

A more industrious option might be to try leveraging your combined experience. There are endless opportunities for providing very basic and extremely niche enterprise apps which pay pretty nicely. She may have some ideas in this regard related to her job, either for an application that would make a common task easier or that would just compete with a complicated app. One of my favourite models is to compete with a complicated ancient piece of enterprise software by reducing the feature set and offering it for cheaper. The trick is to keep things extremely simple.

Without knowing where you are now, I can't comment on your decision about moving to some other country, but fortunately you have valuable skills which will help you find work anywhere. Definitely consider the cost of living in any country you want to move to compared to the amount of money you can make working remotely - it sounds like you're in an area with comparatively low wages, and by that standard I assume the cost of living in your country is less expensive than, for example, the US.

I love to see the connection between science and philosophy. I used to see philosophy as useless, and in modern practice it often seems that way, but I think it's fair to say that all science has philosophical roots - in this case, what is time?

Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction?

What about space? Another dimensional abstraction? It becomes a semantic argument. A valuable one, but still - it is quite possible (probable?) that all human understanding is an abstraction of sorts. The fun part of engineering is learning to build stuff using the abstractions that we have experimented with enough for their behaviour to be predictable to some extent.

Thanks for the recommendation - I will be buying Hedgehogging this week if I can't find it at the library.

I can't even say any more than that about the article - it would be like when my Mom tries to talk about programming. I just thought I'd drop a little plug for the film here (no affiliation) in case anyone else wanted an interesting and easy starting point for this stuff :)

I think a lot of blatant self promotion comes across as spammy to "people like me" (for lack of any real description of what that might be), but the more I look around, the more I realize that most people eat it up.

There have been many times where I've jumped into direct competition with other sites (and I haven't been at this terribly long) because I thought I could do better. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But I don't think it was wrong or unfair, and I don't think I was stealing any ideas.

It seems to me a lot of "Show HN" is a cheap excuse for claiming you've done your part to drive traffic to your site, even if that traffic is less than pertinent to your site's demographic.

That, I can get on board with. Show HN because you want critique, show HN because you want employees, show HN because you want l337 hax0r cred, but unless HN is your target market, please, for god's sake, find your target market and show them, too.

I think it's more complicated than that. "Following orders" is not an acceptable defense, and for that reason I think leaking classified documents is not only sometimes justifiable but that it is sometimes an absolute necessity (ie. in the case where classified documents are the only evidence of a crime). Most of the time, though, you're probably right - classified documents should remain secure.

Sites like Wikileaks provide incentive to those with classified information to leak it.

Part of my point in the previous post was that if there is a weak point in an organization, there will be a leak. I think there is enough incentive for information leaks without Wikileaks - I have no source for this but I suspect that the diplomatic cables alone would have been worth millions in the black market before the leak. Wikileaks is actually one of the safest places for this information to go.

EDIT: In case it wasn't clear - I am calling the policy asinine, not the employees/contractors.

My counterpoint is twofold: maintaining secrecy and security is the responsibility of the government(s) involved. Chasing Wikileaks after the fact and twisting the arms of those they do business with only lends credence to the fact that the parties involved failed to protect classified information. If Wikileaks was able to get it, so would anyone bent on causing harm. The mere fact that Wikileaks released it exposes serious security flaws. Punishing them for that is akin to punishing hackers who expose a Windows vulnerability instead of selling it to the highest bidder - enormously foolish in my opinion.

The second counterpoint is maybe more important: the fact that the US government chooses to silence Wikileaks by making them the pariah of internet business sets an extremely poor precedent, should the internet allow them to succeed. I think most HN users agree that net neutrality is a good, important thing. I suspect most of us agree that internet censorship on the scale of the Chinese firewall is damaging. (Note: I and probably many others agree that things like child porn are a good thing to try to keep off the internet, and the distinction in my opinion is that society has a responsibility to protect children as much as we can.) So then why would we allow government and big business to shut down a website that is holding them up to a journalistic standard they aren't used to?