Hacker News Reader

tomh-on WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

I've not yet signed up, but I will later today to check out how this services tries to trick people into paying money with the promise of good looking girls waiting to talk to you.

From TC:

" After a user "friends" someone, we pop up 6 "other people like him" and the user can select up to 6 people to "say hi" to. Again, we try to focus on 1) relevance and 2) online now in populating those suggestions."

Does that mean that a user has to pay for his curiosity just to see a bunch of "say hi" messages?

tomh-on Apple responds: we want a cut of Amazon, Sony e-book sales

How long till I have to pay Apple 30% for ordering a pizza using an iPhone? How long till I have 30% premium to pay for shopping online using a mac computer?

tomh-on Ask HN: I dropped out. How do I continue my CompSci education?

Those seem atleast the core fundementals! Maybe pick up compiler design, functional programming and software engineering/architecture

tomh-on How's Your HTML5? App Skills in Demand

This article is behind a paywall, any other url?

tomh-on The European startup ecosystem arrived

There is a lot going on in Copenhagen, Denmark is also often ranked as the best country to start a business as the costs of starting one are low (living there is not) see http://www.prosperity.com/entrepreneurship.aspx.

In my country, Holland, many people mention Amsterdam, I don't agree with that in the sense that it is a hub. The up and coming region here is Utrecht, it has a province and university backed business incubator Utrecht Inc. and a government backed gaming incubator, which both enabled some startups with national or global impact. The startup scene is still behind that of other countries and the numbers of 'me too', 'Y for X', 'X for social media' or 'X which doesn't suck' ideas are huge.

tomh-on [dead]

It's not down.

tomh-on Software engineers hard to find

I think he meant technology knowledge rather than skill. For example rejecting a candidate with 10 years of java experience because they need a programmer who needs 10 years of python experience.

tomh-on (Lots of ((Irritating, Spurious) (Parentheses)))

Note that the article is from 2005. Also comparing a lamborghini cup holder with syntax of a programming language doesn't make sense at all. The syntax of a language is something you look at and work with for maybe 8 hours a day and is the key part in communicating the language with the compiler and your coworkers.

The reason I, and I guess many other people don't like the lisp syntax is pure taste and psychological. I don't really care about a list of technical arguments why it is good. I don't like reading or writing the syntax lisp is written in and that will not change. That has nothing to do with being openminded or possible technical superiority over C style syntax. Writing and reading source code is far more enjoyable using other syntaxes solving the exact same problems so why should I bother with lisp?

PS: Who on earth would drink coffee in his fancy lamborginhi :D

tomh-on StackOverflow clone, created entirely with Redis and jQuery

Why would you provide an implementation with noscript tags? only 0.01% of your users will probably be affected. These are the users who never click or view ads anyway, why spent time for them while you could implement more important features?

tomh-on U.S. teenager tortured in Kuwait and barred re-entry into the U.S.

Unfortunately, if a small portion of HN'ers find this story worth upvoting, it will hit the frontpage, even though it is a very political article with no relevance to hackers, technology or startups nor does it affect life of the typical HN audience. As HN becomes more mainstream, expect more mainstream articles.

tomh-on Poll: How much do you trust Google?

Where is the option "I don't trust them with anything, but use them anyway because there are no better alternatives" :)

tomh-on Idea: Y Combinator for Startup Recruiting

This article focusses on new college grads. The questions remain, are college grads the right choice for startups and are startups the right choice for college grads. The answer will probably depend on the type of startup, the grad and time available for mentoring and training the new grad. Though I suspect the majority of silicon valley startups concentrate on hiring experienced people in the early stage before they have the resources and time to invest in new grads.

Personally I would prefer to work a couple of years for a more established company to become expert in certain technologies and learn how stuff happens at "real" companies.

tomh-on I'll Build Your MVP for $1k

I'm curious, on what do you base your price? It seems impossible to me to realistically provide a fixed price on unknown specifications or are there any conditions (ex. max 40 hours of work)?

tomh-on I suck at web design, so I made a contest to design rubycommitters.org.

Just out of interest, what kind of functional code for what kind of projects? I imagine we are talking fortune 500 clients here?

tomh-on Functional Jobs

Nice, I really like the layout for some reason, hope it succeeds!

tomh-on Windows Phone 7 development from the perspective of an iOS developer

That is exactly my point, why develop for WP7 if you can work with the technologies you want for other platforms which also have a higher userbase?

However I suspect that some of the titles from companies such as EA or Gameloft are still written in C++ even though it is not supported officially by Microsoft. It is highly likely that they have some kind of early access to native code compilation for the platform.

tomh-on Windows Phone 7 development from the perspective of an iOS developer

You are overestimating XNA. Most (almost all) high quality games for Xbox and PC are written in C++. It is even more likely that they could be ported to iOS or Android more easily due the simple fact that they allow native code. XNA would be a competitor to the popular Unity game engine which at the moment has a more competitive platform to build for (webplayer, iOS, android) and also offers a superior IDE while offering the same language support as XNA. In addition to that, UDK and the ID engine are also being ported to support iOS and Android. Feel free to point me to a list of high quality in XNA produced titles.

Good game developers are able to create games regardless of the quality of the tools. Its part of the fun to create impressive games with limited resources and tools.

Other than marketing the fact that Microsoft also created a successful game console and xbox live, I don't think Microsoft has any advantage here. Xbox live could be a key differentiator but only after a significant market share has been gained. I don't think people will buy a WP7 phone for Xbox live. Currently iOS offers the best games.

tomh-on Some thoughts on finding mobile developers or finding work as a mobile developer

It is a good article, but I think they might overestimate the necessity to have several successful mobile projects under your belt. See http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/11/the-5-myths-of-building-a-g...

tomh-on Microsoft confirms 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 handsets sold since launch

At this point, for most developers the choice is Silverlight (.net/c#) and XNA (for games). I think only a limited amount of publishers are able to publish native c/c++ applications.

tomh-on Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

As of the moment of writing, I do not see HTML5 competing with native games. Especially on mobile devices the performance problems are still to big to make it possible to write the same games as you could write natively. Also I was mentioning native 3D games, not native games such as casual/2d. It could quite possibly be that in the future it will be competing with native 3d games, but right now, this is not realistic to claim.

tomh-on Impact HTML5 Game Engine released

This is comparing apples with oranges. HTML5 games are meant to compete with current flash games, not with native (and far more expensive to create) 3D games like the one in the video. Most of the succesful mobile games are created using a 2d engine. In the future, this could be done using HTML5 and its nice to see that some pioneers in the field already release engines to play around with it.

tomh-on Android vs iOS: A Developer's Perspective

Angry Birds on the Galaxy Tab runs smooth as hell. It runs better than my Angry Birds at my ipod touch..have you actually tried it on the Galaxy Tab recently?

tomh-on Ask HN: The future of programming languages?

Game developers don't only use it for speed. Mainly for portability. With c/c++ they can make (portions of their) code run on xbox/ps3/nintendo wii/ds/iphone/whatever.

tomh-on Offer HN: Advice from PhD on NLP, machine learning, and data monetization

Thanks! Have some reading to do :)

tomh-on Offer HN: Advice from PhD on NLP, machine learning, and data monetization

I posted two questions.

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/3084/what-components-do...

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/3085/which-techniques-i...

thanks!

(ps please don't upvote me, I like my 1337 karma)

tomh-on Ask HN: What are the websites that you rely on but have horrible UI?

Windows live mail

tomh-on Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

I totally forgot about Windows somehow, I use it on a daily base too and I'm very happy with it :)

tomh-on Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

The tools don't matter, it might be nice, but even though "tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment" I can't recall the last time they produced a product having superior user experience thanks to those tools. I can't name a single website/webapp/desktop app that I enjoy using on a daily base made with visual studio. I know a lot of the game companies use visual studio (c++) to produce parts of their games, but I'm not sure which of the latest games are produced using XNA.

My point is the tools don't matter as much as the strategy and decisions of Microsoft in other parts of the ecosystem to attract talent to produce content for their devices.

tomh-on Rolling out Windows Phone Marketplace for Launch

So...who from HN is developing for this market place or plans to do that? I really wonder what kind of audience of developers this device attracts.

tomh-on [dead]

http://twitter.com/intellicode

code, startups, android, html5, games