instruction
stringlengths 4
105
| output
stringlengths 8
56.7k
|
|---|---|
Please review my webapp (Streetread) | tzury: nifty application -- |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | PieSquared: Well, one thing that definitely contributed was that Blizzard had already established the scene for with Warcraft III, so people sort of knew what type of world to expect. Also, Blizzard's other games (Starcraft and Warcraft mainly) were a huge success, so that gave WoW more credibility. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | noodle: it appealed to both hardcore and casual gamers, and at least for a while, was successful in that respect. it didn't require the latest and greatest gaming rig to run it and enjoy it. there is a huge social aspect to it, which i think luckily coincided with the development of solid VOIP technology to make it more than just text-based communications. it came from an established company with a guaranteed fanbase -- it didn't have to build itself up from the ground level.i used to play. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | alaskamiller: - Quality. Blizzard-level of quality is hard to attain; they perfect every little detail.- Approachability. From newbies to hardcore players, it entices them in and keeps them entertained.- Sociability. More times than not, people just chat while standing around and make friends. Or join guilds and participate in the bigger quests.- Addictive. For the Diablo hack and slash crowds. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | ilamont: The social element, the rich and expandable storylines, and the relatively low hardware threshhold to play it. Internationalization helped a ton, as well. In China, it's a pop-culture phenomenon -- advertisements for other brands use WoW characters a lot.And, of course, Blizzard/WoW has a sustainable business model.I have to say, however, that the UI and some of the complexity related to tools and weapons is a bit of a turn-off, and is probably a barrier to more widespread subscriptions, IMHO. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | xlnt: WoW has very repetitive PvM gameplay (so do its competitors). No one seems to mind very much. I guess Blizzard's designers understand what most people want in a game much better than I do (I love Warcraft 3. I tried to play WoW, but got bored.) |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | iron_ball: VOIP isn't it. Only the hardcore had third-party VOIP applications like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, and in-game VOIP is a very recent thing.Instead, I can break the game's success into three aspects: initial install, short-term retention, and long-term retention.Getting people to even pick up a game (or register with a webapp) is one of the hardest parts. World of Warcraft came into the space with a huge lead in that respect. With the established base of extremely loyal fans, and giant brand recognition in its space, it was sure to get massive attention. The vast majority of new products cannot hope for a thousandth of the eager launch-day users WoW had. Blizzard reaped the fruits of years of brand-building and marketing.Short-term retention is covered in other comments. The game runs well on old hardware, looks pretty due to great art direction, plays smoothly, doles out a lot of quick rewards, and so on. Over the first few weeks, the player is bombarded with tons of fun things to do and sharp increases in character power.Long-term retention is the real magnet, though: the game never becomes a chore until the very end. All the way to the max level, the player is led from locale to locale, challenge to challenge, in a masterly display of game design. Compare the solo-friendly WoW leveling experience with the infamous "hell levels" of Everquest.And what's more, people seem to keep playing at the maximum level, even if they are NOT tackling the high-end raid content. (For the uninitiated, a "raid" is an extremely difficult, often murderously difficult game area whose enemies can only be defeated with a level of teamwork, personal skill, and above all time investment beyond the capabilities of most players.)Raid gamers are not where Blizzard is making its bread and butter. Instead, the people WoW is retaining are the people who are doing repetitive, seldom-updated content in exchange for slow, incremental, but guaranteed rewards. For example, there is a Capture the Flag team-battle level that has not changed in years -- and people still play it, over and over, in exchange for a handful of points each time. Thousands and thousands of these points can be traded in for a top-notch weapon.The final major retention pull for WoW is the social aspect: after a while, you aren't playing so you can have fun. You're playing so OTHER people can have fun. You don't want to let down your team, so you log in for scheduled events whether you like it or not. This afflicts raid and "casual" players alike, to different degrees.So, you want to make a Facebook app that taps into the same qualities as WoW? Make it extremely fun to use at first; give users a sense of reward and increasing power/ability; then make the rewards come slower and slower, in less and less value, for the same amount of work. Just like the diminishing returns from a drug addiction... oh, and somehow monetize it. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | roberto: So, you have no idea why it's successful, and yet you want to replicate it on a facebook app? A facebook app is not a mmorpg, so you'd have to understand in depth the success of WoW to map it onto a completely different environment, drawing analogies from one world to the other.It would be the same to ask, Why is the Porsche so successful? I want to replicate its ideas on a facebook app... |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | notauser: I played it for quite a while, which is really unusual for me (I generally get bored of a game after about 20 minutes.) There were a few factors for getting it:- My friends were going to play it. So I added my pre-order to the list.- It was really easy to get into, with some fun intro quests.- The point and click skill level was really low.The reasons I carried on playing were (somewhat) different:- I made lots of friends and acquired power and influence (establishing a raiding guild.)- Regular rewards. Damn you Pavlov and your accursed bell.- Customisable interface. It was my game in their environment.And the reasons I left:- I felt I had gained as much out of the leadership experience as I was going to get.- My other projects were being neglected and I wanted to catch up.- Frequency of reward dropped (as I mostly had them all).All in all it was a pretty worthwhile. Certainly managing a raiding guild, running an engineering team, and herding cats have many things in common. (Scarcity of loot/loot/fish for example.) And after a year break from personal projects I bounced back into it with a vengeance and extra energy - I got a book published, passed the first of my finance exams, and got back into programming all at the same time. |
Please review my webapp (Streetread) | ucdaz: I would also add a voting feature.
What did you use to write this? RoR? |
Seeking Hacker/s for Co-Founder | babul: Did you not get many responses from your YouNoodle post? |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | bprater: Awesome thread. Compare this to your own business models folks, there is gold in understanding how Wow because such a powerhouse. You may not be able to apply all the principals, but just a few can make a world of difference in your start up.We often talk about community on our sites. You ain't seen real community until seen Wow after you've played any serious amount of time. I have many real-life friends that I've met in real-life through playing the game. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | mattmaroon: I think it's mostly escapism. Everyone here has a lot of reasons why people are choosing this form of escapism over another like television or some other MMORPG, and a lot of them are good ones, but in the end it just comes down to the game being engaging enough that it makes you forget about all of the troubles in your life for a few hours while you play it.I would argue that most people who engage in it (or any other form of escapism) for a large number of hours are depressed. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | shaurz: I believe it is laced with crack. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | imperator: The reasons are manifold.1. They took every lesson from every MMORPG before them, and put it into WoW. This means things like PvP flags, and not having death exact a heavy toll. This was not obvious to WoW's predecessors. Generally, Blizzard does not enter a market first, they wait, let others innovate, and then combine features into a heavily polished product crafted around an easily understood theme.2. They reward human psychological tendencies to generate habits. This is done through staging a series of rewarding goals. The repetitive parts are not so repetitive that you lose sight of the goal. If the user can hold the goal in their mind and find achieving it satisfying, then a player will return multiple times to what is essentially the same task.3. They capitalize off of the desire for novelty. Blizzard did a great job of establishing variance in terrain, music, audio, objectives, and creatures. Little touches like non-enemy animals roaming the land broke up the environment into a place that felt diverse enough to be real. Providing places with enough characteristics to endow unique identity made the place even more memorable. A heavily carpeted room, a place that emanated foreboding, or a bizarrely twisted tree. Places like that were memorable and this prevented them from entering into the tedium.4. They struck the perfect balance between the feeling of work and play by fostering the social component well. Try playing WoW by yourself and with others. These will be very different experiences. One will eventually be a boring game, and the other will incorporate the pleasant grooming of conversation so well, you'll discover you're talking more than playing the game. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | gregstoll: Points that come to mind:- The leveling curve is just about right. At the beginning you gain levels very quickly, and with them new and exciting abilities. You always feel like you're making progress, be it with better spells, better gear, getting to adventure in new zones, etc.- It's very casual-friendly. When you're logged out you earn "rest XP" which, upon logging back in, lets you level faster, so you don't have to play in large chunks of time to make progress. It's also pretty easy to level all the way up to 70 (max level) playing by yourself.- There's a surprising amount of humor (pop culture references, etc.) which is a nice bonus.- There are lots of things to do even at max level - this wasn't as true in the past but you can do daily quests, play in one of the four PvP battlegrounds, join an arena team, do raids, etc. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | keefe: I think that it comes down to the same reason Civ was such a popular franchise. Whenever you finish one thing, there's another thing to do. Oh, just a few more points until I level... oh, I can finish this dungeon and get a new sword. There's also the social aspects of that - you do a dungeon with some friends, get involved in their dungeons later so it has a social motivation for returning as well. I think you also get emotionally attached to your character, and don't want to see him deleted by canceling your account. |
Please review my webapp (Streetread) | aston: Ahh! Broken back button! Really, really annoying. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | kn0thing: Can't explain, playing WoW. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | giles_bowkett: Addiction. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | Harkins: A lot of good thinking about design of virtual worlds can be found in the archives of the mud-dev and mud-dev2 lists. They've run for ~10 years and include many of the game designers of the current hit games. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | axod: WoW is a commercial success, but I have to say "Is it a moral success?". Is it good for people to get so immersed? To spend their life playing a game like this?I've seen a lot of people get absolutely addicted to the point where they will do nothing else.I think the best thing in terms of profit, and worst thing in terms of decency etc, is that the game never ends. You never win.Personally, I don't think games like WoW are healthy. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | henning: I play WoW about 20+ hours a week (Selecta on Spirestone) and I have played through most of the pre-expansion pack content, so let me comment on this from personal experience.Things that make WoW successful are part of many good games:1) Feelings of accomplishment - you come back to a character every time that you yourself built up. The persistent nature of the game (rather than a first person shooter where every game is a blank slate) is compelling.2) Working with others to achieve a common goal - it's fun to team up with people and take on hard bosses that none of you could defeat individually, or even in smaller groups. The later stages of the game feature god-like foes that require dozens of people working in very, very tight cooperation to defeat, or else everyone will certainly be killed (Sunwell Plateau, etc.). In other words, 50 people randomly banging on the harder bosses will not suffice because the bosses are so powerful they can simply divide and conquer. It really is challenging.Many games have those qualities. What makes WoW better than them?Well, basically WoW corrected a lot of EverQuest's flaws. That's basically it. They had the second-comer advantage in that. It had Blizzard's name behind it, too (Starcraft, Diablo - both highly successful franchises in their own right).Plus, there's a real in-game economy, with a value-added chain and everything (gather or buy raw materials -> turn them into a valuable item -> sell the valuable item at a higher price than the cost of the materials). The game's currency is valuable even up to high levels in the game (although there are many guilds sitting on hundreds of thousands of gold with nothing to really spend it on -- it doesn't scale that high). But, it is definitely valuable to have thousands and thousands of gold.You can't easily "replicate" something you have absolutely no comprehension of.Don't fucking try to treat it like a business application, because it isn't. |
Please review my webapp (Streetread) | ig1: You'll stuggle.You won't even touch the professional markets dominated by reuter/bloomberg/etc. They're playing a whole different ballgame.Which means you'll have to go after the google/yahoo/ms finance market. Which might be possible, but you don't look to have any competitive advantage over those services at all. While on the other hand they have vast competitive advantages over you.My gut feeling from your site and your comments is that you've gone into this project without a good understanding of the market (what's currently available, why people use it) and without a clear user in mind.My personal opinion is that you should scrap it, chalk up the experience, and have another go, but this time concentrate on something you have domain knowledge of. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | alex_c: Short answer: you can't.Long answer: some of the answers in this thread would in theory apply to any MMORPG, but the obvious reality is that most MMORPGs aren't huge successes like WoW.Some of my best guesses:
- great art direction. All the locations, characters, monsters and weapons are colorful and unique. Look at any screenshot and chances are you can tell at a glance WHERE in the game world it is - that's not true for many games out there.
- Blizzard has perfected an effort/reward system more finely tuned and addictive than that of any other company out there. It started in Diablo and they perfected it in Diablo II - WoW is just a continuation. Advancing is easier than in other games, but you know that the next reward is just around the corner so you play "just 5 more minutes". In addition, the rewards somehow avoid being repetitive - it doesn't feel like you're just replacing a 5 with a 6 somewhere, like in other games. As another poster mentioned, it's incredibly Pavlovian.
- Something for everyone. WoW actually manages to be engaging for both casual and hardcore players, for two friends or a couple playing together and for a large clan who know each other from previous games.I don't think Blizzard put in any really innovative ideas in WoW, but their execution was far, far beyond what anyone else has done. Of course, after all their previous hits, they also had the resources to pull it off. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | LPTS: It offered people who are too scared of living to get out and do something in the world an addictive way to enjoy the illusion they have accomplished something without requiring them to engage in life?If you are really sitting around thinking "I want to know how to put ideas from WOW into facebook" you have bigger questions you should be concerned with then "why is WOW so successful." Like "Where is there an actual problem I can solve?" "How can I use my logic and critical thinking skills on my process of deciding what problems to be concerned with and what is important in life?" "Why the hell do I even exist in the twenty first century, with this limitless possibility, and what do I really need to get done before I die?" and "Is mixing facebook apps with WOW really better for the world, from a big picture perspective, then suicide?"I think if you focus on those other questions, this WOW question will clear itself up like magic. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | tokipin: i think it's simply that Blizzard actually thinks about what they're doing. i played various MMORPG's, and many of them had such obvious game design no nos -- like losing experience upon deathit's as if the companies were just shoving together a collection of "challenging things," and thinking they were making a gameso i guess those companies were trying to manufacture games, while blizzard crafts them |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | subwindow: Having spent half of the past 10 years addicted to MMO's, I can tell you:Addiction via immersion and frequent incremental rewards.One: you immerse the user in the game environment so that all of their attention is focused on the game world.Two: using that focus, you provide a system wherein there is the constant availability of incremental rewards. In games like WoW, every single minute spent goes toward achieving a specific incremental reward. You kill a monster: you get a reward (loot + experience), you go to the nearest town: you get new quests. The key is to have a near-term action (< 5 minutes) available to the user at ALL TIMES where they can achieve some kind of small reward. Larger incremental rewards (levels, skills, raids) are available to keep attention once the smaller rewards become rote.Look at anything that's ever been called addictive- not just video games. I bet that they share these two traits, and their addictiveness is directly proportional to how well they accomplish these goals.Can these be applied to a facebook app? Maybe. Would you look sleazy trying to do it with a facebook app? Definitely. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | Goladus: Why is WoW successful?(1) They started with the successful and highly addictive Everquest format.(2) They used a small number of classes, carefully and creatively allocating abilities to each one in order to make that class fun to play: either solo or in a group. They also tweaked the mana/melee balance to be more flexible and interesting and combat was generally faster paced than in other MMORPGs.(3) They set the bar for failure lower, and the penalty for failure was less punishing. This encouraged less-hardcore players to experiment more and try different things, rather than always sticking to the safest tactic.(4) They designed for PvP from the start.(2) + (3) + (4) = Replayability. People log in to play WoW because it's fun to play not just because they want to hit the next level.(5) They used frequent, incremental rewards so that players logged out always having felt as if they accomplished something.(6) They started with a huge Warcraft fanbase, and marketed to their audience with hip, exiting videos and information.(7) They kept system requirements LOW. They focused on getting realism through animations and colorful symbolism rather than high poly counts. They avoided the "uncanny valley" of character models while delivering a game that players could play on the hardware they already owned.(8) They marketed the game worldwide.(9) The game loads quickly, once it's patched. You can decide you want to play WoW and be online in a minute or so. (Others may be better now, but when WoW came out EQ took 5-10 minutes from desktop to spawning in-game)(10) Instanced content made it easy to avoid the more annoying social aspects of an MMORPG. Fighting for spawns was fun in EQ, but that's not needed in WoW because the combat engine is better. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | bayareaguy: My son and daughter were both into this game for about a year before they lost interest and decided they would rather save their money or spend it on other things.I think the thing they liked the most at the start was the fact that there were a relatively large amount of things they could do and discover and then share and showoff.But after they played for a while I noticed they stopped wanting to show me neat new stuff in the game and instead tell me about the people they were playing with. I was really surprised when I learned that my then 13 year old son was regularly spending hours online with armed service personnel stationed in Europe, disabled diabetics from Iowa in their 40's, thirty-something gay couples from Palo Alto, off-duty nurses from Los Angeles, etc. In short just about every kind of person he would never otherwise consider part of his social group.So personally I think the real reason it is successful is that it seems to be able to create the same kind of opportunity for shared experience across cultures in much the same way early radio and television did. |
Why is world of warcraft so successful? | jsmcgd: There are many reasons why it is successful. However for me the most salient reason is that it strongly appeals to casual girl gamers. This demographic can elevate a game to the stratosphere a la sims. |
Are we too homogenous? Maybe, Not yet, But... | gexla: I think it is a problem because busy people have such a short attention spans. Looking through a long list of entries here takes up time. As I find myself scanning entries from NyTimes, CNN or any other major news site then I start to think why I should spend my time looking. |
Code etiquette - tabs or spaces? | simianstyle: My theory is that your IDE should be able to adjust the amount of spaces that 1 tab is equal to, and therefore the whitespace is adjustable across editors that way - so I always use tabs.But if you're so anal about whitespace, there's always regex... |
Code etiquette - tabs or spaces? | newt0311: whitespace. Tabs are non-standard across systems and of a non-unit length and so when custom continuation lines are indented, they have to use a mix which wreaks havoc when the tab length goes from 4 to say 8 or vice versa. If you are interested in re-indenting code, then use a program/command that is actually designed for code re-indentation, not some inaccurate stupid shortcut like tab length manipulation. Pretty much any modern IDE would have a code re-indentation infrastructure. |
Code etiquette - tabs or spaces? | cperciva: To quote BSD style(9): Indentation is an 8 character tab.
If you have to wrap a long statement [because it would go past the 78th column], put the operator at the end of the line. Second level indents are four spaces. Do not add whitespace at the end of a line, and only use tabs followed by spaces to form the indentation. Do not use more spaces than a tab will produce and do not use spaces in front of tabs.If you find that your code doesn't fit into 78 columns using 8-character tabs... you need to refactor your code.If your editor mangles whitespace... get a better editor. |
Please review my webapp (Streetread) | shiranaihito: For Opera, you might want to consider showing a warning instead of completely blocking access. |
Please review my webapp (Streetread) | uuilly: There is a lot of talk in this thread about your target market. They're right, you'll never beat bloomberg. But... I come from a family of Wall St. people and I can attest to the fact that most "street" news is consumed by non-insiders. My dad is a financial advisor and essentially spends his day telling people that what they saw on CNN Moneyline (or whatever it's called) isn't true. So there are plenty of non-pros who you could target.Personally I don't care about the market so I'm not the one to ask. But I thought your site did what it needed to do well... Godspeed. |
Code etiquette - tabs or spaces? | ScottWhigham: Personally I use whatever the editor that the team uses uses as the default (that's right "uses uses", baby! Don't get many opportunities for that!). I'm a big fan of using the defaults when it comes to development. I want to be able to step over to a co-worker's or temporary machine, do my work, check it in and not have to worry whether we used spaces or tabs. |
Code etiquette - tabs or spaces? | brianr: If you're writing Python, the convention is spaces. From PEP 8: Indentation
Use 4 spaces per indentation level.
(see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/)I'm partial to spaces in general. Most (all?) IDEs can insert spaces when you press the tab key, and doing so will prevent the nastiness that can happen when you mix spaces with tabs. |
Code etiquette - tabs or spaces? | wallflower: All the companies I have worked at have enforced spaces by setting up the editor to translate tabs to 4 spaces. I never asked why. Some battles aren't worth fighting.'Spaces instead of tabs' wasn't the near the near-religious fervour of which editor to use though (VSlick won at my 1st company - e.g. company bought group license - though you could buy your own fave). I guess if you spend all day working with a hammer, you want the best hammer for you. I've spent hundreds of my own to buy my own editor to use at work. |
Please review my webapp (Streetread) | terpua: Quick comments:1) Ability to add our own news/blog sources (good for you to expand news sources)
2) Remove username from registration (I realize it's only one field but it's one field less to fill in and don't see the point to it)
3) Make news sources font smaller and in different color. If hyperlinked, it will go to the actual collection of articles from that news source.Simple stock news engine for hobby investors. Useful app. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | aitoehigie: To tell, you the truth, i don't think that your skills will really matter here, and this is from the horses mouth. I live in west africa, which is one of the most stable parts and i am itching to leave to a place where my skill swill be appreciated. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | coglethorpe: You might not be able to provide medical help, but you could teach for free and help others to gain jobs. You could set up a website to help aid those in need (like Kiva, a donation site, or a blog that tells the world about conditions). |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | Mystalic: I love the hypothetical and how you've asked it.But to be serious, your programming skills are going to be of almost no use to them. Hell, go look at the Zimbabwe government's website to see how much they care - http://www.gta.gov.zw/ (prepare to cringe).What skills you DO have are compassion, finances, and the ability to get awareness up HERE. Tons of charities need better and more functional websites that come up more often in SEO. They need more prominent donation tabs, they need websites that better explain their mission and better recruit. You can create a site to promote a cause, you can team up with someone and start your own charity (I intend to).There's tons you can do. Just because you're not on location doesn't mean you're not making an impact. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | menloparkbum: Rather than parachuting in, you could simply book a flight to one of the international airports located on the continent.Teaching would be the obvious useful occupation. However, everywhere needs good teachers, not just Africa. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | eatenbyagrue: You could probably help transferring an unclaimed fund of $25,000 from which I am in dire need of immediate assistance. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | evilneanderthal: I'd have to say I think you'll end up using your nunchuku skills and bow hunting skills more than your hacker skills. |
Please review my webapp (Streetread) | ideamonk: DESIGN - the transparent menu doesn't look CLEAR or nice when it overlays the logos of companies.
Besides, the theme is about rounded corners so why is the dropdown of the menu rectangle, its positioning should be lowered by 3-5px and do something about the transparency. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | pistoriusp: I think the way that you would be able to help the most is been able to educate them. A bit of a "teach a man to fish" mantra.I live in South Africa and we have a serious shortage of programmers in this country, especially when it comes to the open source web based languages. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | acgourley: If someone would like to pitch in, and has has at least basic python abilities, consider helping out with Aaron Swartz's project: www.watchdog.netThere are a lot of bite-size python tasks they need help with. It usually pulling in data from a very unhelpful format and converting it to a helpful format. It's not terribly stimulating but it might be rewarding to enable the data to see the light of day.Check out things you can do at: http://watchdog.jottit.com/volunteer |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | acgourley: Have you contacted http://www.geekcorps.org/ ? |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | bobochan: Wouldn't it make a bit more sense to signup with an organization that is already working on this:http://www.geekcorps.org/As someone that has wired networks, written code and taught some basic computer skills in Africa, I would suggest narrowing down your search a little. Africa is a vast continent and there is a big difference between what you might find in Tunis vs. Kinsangani.There are probably many projects that could benefit from having geek help but do not think you can just "parachute" into many places without a great deal of preparation. Without concrete plans for things like where you are going to live, how you are going to get medical care, etc. you may end up being more of a liability than an asset.Good luck and do not give up trying to find a way to help. I lived and worked in Africa for four years after college and it was a great experience. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | subwindow: I had been considering doing something similar in Ghana. I thought about it for a few weeks and kept coming back to teaching. Teaching programming in particular probably wouldn't be very useful, but teaching basic computer skills definitely would be.If you worked with a small town (provided they had access to reliable power), you could probably have a measurable impact on the local economy. That is really the only way I could sustain myself in such a situation- by being able to see the good I'm doing to a whole community. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | dazzawazza: To be fair no. Working for a charity isn't really going to help either (I refere you to the last 50 years where outside of disaster relief charity has done little to remove people from poverty).If you really want to help, buy the things they make and lobby YOUR government to lower trade barriers. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | jfischer: You might help out with a project like OpenMRS (http://openmrs.org/wiki/OpenMRS). This is an open source medical records application used in several African countries, primarily for HIV/AIDS care. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | aditya: This guy did it, but don't parachute in cuz you might break something and cause more harm...http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/9/3/151048/0948 |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | biohacker42: Skill X, can not fix or much help a broken state.Even a doctor could only help those in close physical proximity and in no need of advanced medical tech or much expensive drugs.The fix for broken states is to fix the state, then the economy takes off and your stills are needed.Most broken states are run by undemocratic governments, to "fix" them you need a change of regime. Undemocratic states often spy on their citizens to stay in power. So l337 crypto skill could help a democratic underground communicate and organize. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | mechanical_fish: A short answer: Politics. That's where your hacker skills have leverage: Education, research, documentation, analysis, logistics, fundraising, diplomacy.Of course, we can't discuss many details here, because politics is anathema on news.yc unless IP law is involved. :)[And that, BTW, is why we see all these posts lamenting that hackers "never do enough to solve the world's big problems" -- most of the world's big problems are intensely political, and politics is to news.yc as sex was to Victorian England. Of course, just because we don't talk about political issues here doesn't mean we don't work on them, off camera.]Actually, though, IP law is relevant: If you can successfully lobby to reduce the patent lifetime for AIDS drugs you will save an order of magnitude more lives in Africa than you could ever do with your own two hands.Another source of leverage is, obviously, invention. Hackers are good at inventing things, much of which you can do in your own shop (where you are most productive).None of this should stop you from traveling to Africa, but the most useful thing you can do there is learn: Once you have a first-hand look at the life and problems of an African person you may have a better idea of how to apply your leverage. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | ComputerGuru: Your programming skills: No.Your talents and engineering senses? Most definitely.The idea is the same, the venue is different, that's all. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | babul: Don't know about the parachuting in bit and most people won't have/use computers, but mobiles are making big impact/inroads in third/developing worlds. Ideally do something using them.So, perhaps a text based mobile service (most places do not have mobile-internet yet) to do something useful may be of value e.g. to find the current market price of rice (to buy/sell without being cheated) or warn about events like potential flood/hurricane risk or when the next bus is coming or text-based bartering system or even just teaching the kids how to use the OLPCs effectively. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | ismail: hey, being from Africa: Yes, you could,though i dont in 'aid' and charity in Africa we need to resolve our problems, only then will we learn how to compete in the global economy. So for example, encourage entreprenuership etc.Take a look at the bigger picture being how do can you use your technology skills to programme/code something to make a difference? To assist with the issues being faced in Africa (And globally).i.e The current inflation being felt world wide, the energy crisis(fuel / power), the food crisis with the high prices of food, in places like the US it does not affect people and even for some people like myself it will not affect me since i can afford the higher prices. However when it comes to people who can just barely pay for their daily food, it leads to starvation.So yes, while we build 199999 Facebook(x) clone or silly little online app, millions of people out there are starving and can barely make ends meet.Think about that.There is a group created to put into action practical technology solutions to target some of these issues, feel free to join.http://groups.google.com/group/technologyforchange |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | aneesh: You can work with others. Develop point-of-sale software to improve efficiency at crowded stores. Cell phone software can make markets more efficient and prevent price-setting that farmers suffer from. Then there's medical records software.All of these 1) require some domain expertise, even if small 2) are conceptually simple, but the delivery is hard |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | sutro: Check out these guys:http://www.inveneo.org/I recently met the founder at an event in SF. He gave me a demo of their very impressive solar-powered computer product. This is a high-tech nonprofit run in an entrepreneurial way by people who are trying to change the world for the better. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | dhbradshaw: Bluetooth enabled wearable thermometer. Chip design, convenience, measurement, programming for devices are some of the challenges.Anyone else in medical diagnostics? |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | bjelkeman-again: With the right plan I think you can be more effective if you stay at home and deploy your Hacker skills.Mechanical-fish wrote in another thread: "Wake me up when you have an actionable plan to solve a problem. That would be interesting."We identified a big internet service/applications gap in the development-aid water and sanitation sector. Essentially these people are stuck in the LP/cassette tape age, when the rest of the world moved on to iPods and p2p networks.Some basics:Market size: 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation, 1.1 billion lack safe water to drink. Some US$10 billion is spent every year to try to resolve that problem. The goal is to halve those numbers by 2015 (UN MDG goals), but that isn't going to happen.Problem: There are lots of problems with development aid, but we are focusing on a couple of specific areas:
information exchange, funding and monitoring and reporting.Information exchange – Information about low cost, appropriate technologies and sustainable water and sanitation solutions for low-income households and communities is very hard to find and collect for the non-specialists. Information is available, but spread over a large number of sources, and essentially disorganised.Funding – The water and sanitation community struggles to attract additional flows of money and connect funds directly to where the demand is. It is estimated that around 15-30% of budgets are directed away from intended beneficiaries due to corruption and high overhead costs, partially due to a lack of transparency. It is specifically difficult to find grants and loans for local initiatives, even though these initiatives have proved to be very efficient.Monitoring and reporting – Monitoring and reporting are often used as a means to ‘justify’ a correct use of funds, not as a tool to intervene pro-actively in projects while they are evolving. The sector is stuck in the “thick Word report” process, rather than using easy to use IT tools. Additionally the sector struggles to visualise and share results in an appealing way to those outside the sector.You can take what I considere basic internet tools and drastically improve the "state of the art" that the people working in this field today use. Which is what we are doing, like picking low hanging fruit. We are putting together a non-profit foundation to work on this and deliver some tools.We are putting together three integrated products:- Akvopedia – the first truly open knowledge platform dedicated to water and sanitation
- Akvo Matchmaking – an unique marketplace for water and sanitation projects screening and funding
- Akvo Really Simple Reporting (RSR) – an easy and transparent way to track projects in the field and to share and visualise resultsEssentially a Wikipedia for water and sanitation knowledge, eBay, Blogger and YouTube for water and sanitation projects, rolled into one.The tools we develop ourselves will be available under GPL and the platform is available at an "at cost" basis to the users, who are NGOs, government departments and companies. Which will be way below in cost what they can provide for themselves.We are in the process of deploying the platform and building out the first product, Akvo RSR. The web site is essentially a wireframe which we used as part of our fundraising, which will be swapped out with the real thing during the summer.We have more than a dozen development-aid partners and we are working with hundreds of field partners lining up to use the system, and expect to put the first 25-50 projects on the system over the next couple of months. The goal is to scale this up to thousands of projects over the next year and then further.I could go to Africa and work as a hydrologist (I have the education) but I think that I am going to be much more effective rolling out some modern internet systems to make all these people working in this field more effective. Our funders agree with me, otherwise I don't think they wouldn't have given us money. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | rokhayakebe: Given the fact that the consumption of video and audio will only increase I would like to see a remote control specially made for that purpose. It should not be hard. Maybe it will be an improved mouse. I looked around, but could not find anything that would satisfy my need. I may go on and get a prototype built. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | akd: If you parachute into mainland Africa, the most likely outcome for you is death.I had a friend who worked in Kenya for a few months and the class conflict was so tense there that he had six armed bodyguards on the advice of his employer. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | augustus: We are working on some devices for the home of the future operated through the Internet. I know a hardware guy so we are diversifying our product offerings. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | noel_gomez: I want to build a better set top box because everything I have seen is either tied to some service (apple, tivo, netflix), is not polished enough for mass market (too many features in Linux MCE), or is too expensive > $500.But alas I have no hardware skills so I will have to wait till someone else does it. :-) |
Platform that requires Java == only requires JVM? | wmf: http://mantrid.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/do-android-dream-of-...Summary: Sort of. Scala yes, JRuby/Jython no. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | cubicle67: Yeah, a friend of mine is.He's built a video game console kit. hardware is complete, software mostly done, teaching material still to come. What it aims to do is take you through the steps required to build a game console, from how to get a signal on the screen, how video memory and sound etc work right up to building games. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | toni: Are there blogs (ala TechCrunch) that cover hardware startups? It will be interesting to follow them regularly. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | DaniFong: It's not really at a startup stage, but I'm trying to, with some friends and burning man people, see if I can build/design an extremely lightweight and cheap parabolic trough out of carbon fiber and mylar, for electric and mechanical power generation. I'm iterating through to see if wind is a blocking issue.I also had some designs for a powered wheel with two degrees of freedom, without a caster, to remove some of the angular momentum problems that classic approaches face. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | SwellJoe: My first startup was a hardware company. I don't recommend it, unless your problem can't be solved any other way. The vast majority of hardware is a commodity, and if it isn't today, it will be in a year or two when Chinese manufacturers get it figured out.Someone else mentioned medical devices, and I definitely think that's a great area. But most folks I meet who want to do hardware are going after the consumer market, which is a hard business to enter as a startup. |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | mattmaroon: I would be if I were smart enough. |
suppose I parachute into mainland Africa, could I help the people with my Hacker skills? | ihack4fun: i think the root of all problems/evil in africa comes from lack of (bad.. very bad!) leaders. there's mugabe on one extreme and many other mini-mugabes who are "sly" enough to go unnoticed (they are not sly or clever or whatever but just downright stupid!), and worst of all, potentially "good" leaders will simply never get to lead because of the long queue of bad leaders waiting to get to the top and make themselves rich - and who , believe me , are ready to do anything to make sure that the "good" ones never lead - including murder.
kenyan example - yet its not the worst
1. MPs in kenya , one of the poorest countries in the world, take home AT LEAST 8000$ per month (it must be 10000$ by now) , much more than most rich countries. they vote for these salaries and block the parliament activities (hold hostage) if they dont get the amount they wanted - after all they are the law makers !.
2. Before elections, several women who wanted to become MPs we're beaten , raped etc.. in order to scare them.
3. Now , after elections, with the hard times and especially after a near civil war situation ( also because of "kenyan leaders greed for power" - that's another long story !) ,
MP revenue taxation was proposed ( i had forgotten to mention they are not taxed ) - they we're obviously up in arms against it and vowed it would never happen - even if they earn 1000 times more than the average kenyan, who pays taxes.
i believe african countries have their share of talent ( intellectuals, artists, good leaders .. all what you want) only that they never (and might never) get to exercise it.
many africans know this so they simply have no faith in govt and live like they dont have them - which is more or less true, this means living in some very chaotic societies where the strong survive and the rest are left to try and survive.
let me cut it for now but if you can hack the bad leaders and replace them with good ones - maybe that might just be the hack of the century :) |
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup? | cpr: No, but there are still a lot of opportunities out there which require hardware.One idea struck me the other day: why not use your iPhone (or Android phone) as a home phone handset, when you're home and in Wifi range? That would require a specialized base station (perhaps running a stripped-down Asterisk) that recognized when your phone was in range, and would "ring" it on demand, let you pick up your home phone any time, etc. |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | subwindow: When I've planned out sharded infrastructures, the database usually wasn't that big of a concern. The web framework or system architecture are usually the pain point. And with Rails, you have to abuse establish_connection if you're going to have each web head read from multiple shards.The easiest route I've gone when setting up a sharded infrastructure is to use subdomains and a 1-1 Web:DB setup. Have each subdomain go (either thru a reverse proxy or hardware load balancer) to a different (sharded) webhead. Each web head talks to two databases- the common database and its sharded DB. With this you'll probably want a "common" web head to handle home page traffic and authentication (after they are authenticated they'd get dished off to their shard).Salesforce.com was my inspiration for this method, and it is probably reasonably common. It probably also has a name, but I do not know what it is. |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | gaius: You probably want this 1986 paper: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/hpts85-nothing.pdf |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | prakash: google search sharding site:highscalability.comhttp://tinyurl.com/5znhvu |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | sanj: It seems like I'm not the only one searching.Here's something from my own archives:http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/ddl-partition... |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | dzohrob: Most of the methods people use for sharding/partitioning end up in the application layer, because open-source DBs just aren't fancy enough yet to handle this.Mysql-proxy (http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Proxy) looks promising, but it's still in an alpha state. You could try writing a proxy script in Lua -- there's already some master /slave stuff done in this area.Mysql 5.1 supports partitioning, but not really in the way that you and I mean.The problem is that sharding breaks some fundamental SQL axioms -- for example, doing SELECTs no longer returns all rows (depending on how the table is partitioned).Almost everyone I know who does this rolls their own layer. As subwindow mentioned, if you're using Rails, you have to futz with establish_connection due to ActiveRecord's assumptions about one DB connection per class. It's possible -- we've done it -- but it requires lots of connections to the DB and it can be messy. If you're on Rails, it might be easier to scale vertically first before going horizontal.Replication doesn't need to change in this context -- the Mysql documentation should be all you need to get started. |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | lpgauth: Not exactly sure if this can help you but I guess you could implement the logic using dbslayer.http://github.com/harrisj/activerecord-dbslayer-adapter/tree... |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | aston: The 2nd edition of High Performance MySQL might interest you:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596101716It covers, among tons of other stuff, some new features in MySQL 5.1 that make partitioning easier. |
The Secret Sauce of Angel Investment? | tptacek: You are extremely impressive. We need 1,000 more hacker founders like this. This is, incidentally, exactly what Paul Hawken says he did for Smith and Hawken in "Growing a Business". |
The Secret Sauce of Angel Investment? | phil_KartMe: Great post. you followed some important start-up rules:(1) get a prototype or "good enough" version out early and be prepared to iterate(2) hit a milestone that impresses investors before raising funds. measurable customer traction is an impressive milestone(3) only raise money when you need it, and make sure to raise enough to safely hit the next milestone that will impress investors |
The Secret Sauce of Angel Investment? | wumi: What is a Pro Version?"Finish “Pro” version. This is simply the current offering but with the menu moved to the top so
space is freed on the width of the page for more user data. New features would go to Pro
version users and not to Free version users. Eventually the pro version features would be
very compelling."Congrats on funding. |
The Secret Sauce of Angel Investment? | edw519: I am not nearly as smart as most of the people on HNAll evidence to the contrary.Excellent overview for a potential angel. May not tell them everything, but it's a good starting point for questions and discussion. It also shows that your "finger is on the pulse," perhaps one of the most important things.I'm sure this will inspire other single founders. Thanks for sharing. |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | rit: I don't know about Rails (It's DB library is ActiveRecord, if I recall names correctly) but SQLAlchemy which is Python's big ORM, has support in it for sharding and similar partitioning, etc.When we built sketchcast.com sharding was on the design list and a concern - there were some fantastic articles at http://highscalability.com/ that we used as a basis for some of our design. |
The Secret Sauce of Angel Investment? | vaksel: Can you tell us how you happened to find your first investor? Since he is in Italy it doesn't seem like this is someone you got through connections. |
"Simple" sharding tutorials using MySQL or PostgreSQL? | alexstaubo: Sharding is icky and hard because it strokes relational databases against the grain. It also, incidentally, goes against the conventions of most web frameworks, including Rails. Since there's no database that does it for you, you really have to design for it from the beginning. Clay Shirky's scalability book, with anecdotes from Flickr's early development, is a must-read.The Skype people do transparent sharding with PostgreSQL (the highscalability.com guy blogged about it here: http://highscalability.com/skype-plans-postgresql-scale-1-bi...). They accomplish this using their own PL/Proxy plugin (http://developer.skype.com/SkypeGarage/DbProjects/PlProxy). The only way they can do this is by _never_ doing SQL in the client. Instead, all SQL is wrapped in server-side functions, aka stored procedures (written in PL/Python). The magic in PL/Proxy is to enable the execution of these functions based on a hash. So for example, a function get_user_email(username) is implemented as:create function get_user_email(username text) returns text as $$
cluster 'userdb';
run on hashtext(username);
$$ language plproxy;...which results in the real function being executed on some other server.There are pros and cons to this approach. Could they not have implemented this in the application? Yeah. The additional latency of doing one extra remote call (even if it can be pipelined) can't be good.Another way of automating sharding is to use a middle layer like PgPool, GridSQL or Continuent uni/cluster. The first two are open-source projects, the latter is commercial; PgPool is written in C, the last two are Java (although GridSQL has C bindings).PgPool is a proxy that can also do replication, partitioning, load-balancing and parallelization -- and you can pretty much pick which ones you want. PgPool intercepts all SQL statements, inspects them, possibly rewrites them, and sends them to one of several backend PostgreSQL servers. For example, it can route all updates to multiple PostgreSQL servers, ensuring that they're identical (until one of them goes offline, at which point you have to pull it manually back into the pool). It can also partition data, by checking inserts and routing them to the right box, and you can write the partitioning functions in PL/pgSQL. And it can also route queries semi-intelligently, so that a query that is known to only touch a single partition will only go to that partition. And it can parallelize them, so that when you do "select * from foo", it'll run the query on all servers and then combine the results.GridSQL covers the same ground as PgPool, but seems a little more advanced. It has a complete SQL parser that is supposed to be able to do query routing and rewriting more efficiently. From what I can see, they are emphasizing performance and parallel queries above anything else.I haven't tried uni/cluster, but it's similar in scope and features.The main problem with these products is that they themselves become a bottleneck. I don't think you can scale them horizontally by just piling on more proxies -- the proxies themselves are gatekeepers. So you're just trading one bottleneck for another.After implementing a couple of large, popular, bottom-heavy, hard-to-scale Rails apps, I am now of the opinion that well-designed apps should never talk directly to a database; by doing this, you are making the database layer a bottleneck, which is particularly bad with relational databases, which cannot scale very far horizontally.Instead, you should have the application serve an internal API that can be broken up and multiplied and moved. For example, consider the get_user_email function from the exampe above. Consider the Rails way:User.find(params[:id]).emailYou are already tied to a very specific code path -- find the object, read the email. To shard this thing, you have to override the find method, as well as any update methods, and you will end up a graceless patch on top of ActiveRecord. What if we made the use case -- getting the email address of a user -- explicit, as a real API?User.get_email(params[:id])Similarly, you would "sculpt" dedicated methods to handle more complicated queries. Consider:User.get_latest_comments(params[:id] :in_forum => params[:forum_id])Now we have isolated ourselves from the database, and we have an API that can actually be sharded. In fact, what we have is an abstraction. Abstractions are useful. Sure, the implementation can use ActiveRecord or whatever, but it's no longer dependent on anything except the input. It's not dependent on database model details like which table holds the email address -- the abstraction separates the concern of the application from the data API.If we have a single app database and it doesn't scale, we can move all the users over to a different server with its own database and make the API be remote, based on a REST or dRb interface. If this user server becomes too slow, we can just add another user server -- "just add another box" is the core tenet of any scale-out stategy.So if I was building a new app today, that's what I would do. |
How do you stay healthy? | makecheck: I walk a lot (e.g. if your only excuse for not doing something is that it's far to walk, it's a chance to walk more).I also pay attention to drinks...for example, if I buy a bottle of Coke, I leave half of it, take it home, put it in the fridge and forget about it. The next day, I'm happy to see it, and it's like a 2nd drink. Only, it's fewer calories. |
Ask HN:What e-commerce package should I use? | SwellJoe: Magento is a more modern application, and looks significantly cleaner internally than Zen or osCommerce. They also have significant forward momentum--it seems to offer the right solution set to a large class of users, and so it's rise in popularity has been dramatic (I get yelled at daily because our product can only install it on a few very modern distros, because of the PHP 5.2 requirement).I don't get a headache (much) looking at the Magento source, but it is a huge project with hundreds of files, and I can imagine it would take a long time to grasp it when it comes to customization. But, the other two you mention are also subject to this problem, and their code is a bit more old-fashioned (and given that the PHP community has only recently begun to pay attention to maintainability and readable/testable code, that's an important consideration). Though none of them seem to have any unit tests, so I guess it's still not quite caught on. |
How do you stay healthy? | augustus: Get a home on the suburbs.I live in Colorado and we have trails behind us where we have occasional visits from deer. This really give me no excuse to stay away from a jog.I used to live in the city but driving to a park to go jogging added 30 minutes to my time to workout and so it frequently got postponed.I also lift weights at the gym. |
Ask HN:What e-commerce package should I use? | amarcus: I love and use osCommerce. There is great support for it in the community. IMHO, oscommerce is only good for the e-commerce aspect and wouldn't really serve well for the "community/social marketing" aspect of the site.I would recommend getting Joomla with the VirtueMart (http://virtuemart.net/) module. VirtueMart provides a very good shopping cart solution and you can use the Joomla CMS for all other aspects of your site. |
How do you stay healthy? | vaksel: I just work out daily. Don't really have time for sports(too big of a time commitment).As far as diet, I don't really watch what I eat, I have a high metabolism and with working out I burn through the extra calories right away...so I can sustain myself on nothing but junk food w/o gaining weight(I actually lost a few pounds the one week I ate nothing but McDonalds, Wendy's, Taco Bell, KFC). |
How do you stay healthy? | natrius: I stopped driving and biked everywhere remotely feasible instead. That took off 20 pounds in three months, though I also ate less food and chose lower glycemic index foods that kept me full longer.People always talk about how staying healthy requires a lifestyle change, and that's definitely true. I've never been one of those gym or running everyday kind of people, so every time I've lost weight, I always ended up slacking on exercise and gaining it all back. I'm more optimistic about my current strategy. I'll always have to go places, and biking is more enjoyable to me than driving (Except when it's 100 degrees and humid outside. Thanks Austin.), so in theory, it should be easier to keep up. |
How do you stay healthy? | delano: Bloody Caesars. |
How do you stay healthy? | randomhack: 1. Walk. A lot.
2. Balanced diet. |
How do you stay healthy? | mrjbq7: Yoga.With a good instructor, it can be a surprisingly strong workout, while also helping to preserve sanity during those long weeks. |