HowardRoark

71 karma · joined March 16, 2010

I second that Grails advice. Jersey, Hibernate and Maven isn't that bad, but Grails beats that anyday if you don't mind Groovy. While Play framework is cool too if you want to stick with Java, but it is not as mature as Grails or any other Java frameworks.

HowardRoarkon Startup School 2010

I think the best one so far was Github Cofounder Tom Preston-Werner's talk. Almost every sentence of his was a gem, and the fact that he had bootstrapped both his startups made it even more interesting!

HowardRoarkon Ask HN: Review my startup, symbyoz.com

I am primarily a Java developer too, but I have very rarely seen any hobby projects being done in Java/Jsp. I wonder if there is a reason why you did it in Java? What framework do you use? Does Java needing a lot of memory have to do with the slowness of the site?

HowardRoarkon Scalatra: A Sinatra-like Web Framework for Scala

Although I love Scala, I preferr Groovy/Grails over Scala/Lift for my web development needs. I would love to give Scalatra a try too.

HowardRoarkon Ask HN: Good books?

I would also add "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" by Richard Bach. Its a simple and inspiring story about a bird who tries to question the very simple facts and norms of life established by generations before.

HowardRoarkon Why I Think (And Hope) Qwiki Will Fail

I thought Qwiki isn't meant to replace Google. And yet it can make certain kind of information retrieval sexier and very helpful - esp. when you might be multitasking. It can very well focus in a vertical markets where it solves the problem well. It doesn't have to fail. Or it might fail but the idea will prevail.

HowardRoarkon Ron Conway Drops A Nuclear Bomb On The Super Angels

Ron Conway rocks but the email almost feels like it was intended to be leaked.

HowardRoarkon Ask HN: Offer of Employment retracted

1. Start looking. 2. Explain to your manager your reasons for leaving and what actually happened. 3. Tell the new company that you are politely calling out their name. And see what they think.

HowardRoarkon Ask HN: Google App engine pricing vs. AWS?

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html

Assuming that is your daily pageviews, you could run that app for free on Google Appengine.

The only down side to Appengine in my experience is the cost of rewriting the app and migration, and performance issues (and cold start up times) related to Appengine's architecture.

HowardRoarkon Is Mark Zuckerberg the Howard Roark of the web?

What?

HowardRoarkon Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

Instead of manually finding interesting people on my niche, I set my criteria and let my program do the dirty work for me. What's wrong with it?

I don't even spam people. I send one link to my site per every 5 witty and inspirational quotes. A few people that I met over there have contributed to my site as guest bloggers.

I am not doing anything evil - just automating something that I would hate to do manually.

HowardRoarkon Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

I have written a script to follow 1000 users on my niche every day. I find that around 15% of users follow me back. In the next couple of days, I remove the rest 85%. I have been doing this for a few months now and I have a few thousand followers on a few twitter accounts. I have set up websites for each of those niches and get decent amount of traffic though twitter. Been banned the first few times, but I have found my ways around it (mostly).

HowardRoarkon Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

I only added top people on my niche!

HowardRoarkon Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

Thank god. Its everyone.

HowardRoarkon Ask HN: Anybody else quitting Facebook over privacy concerns?

I deleted my Facebook account yesterday. I quit Google search 2 years ago. With Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Github and Bing, I don't miss Google search much.

HowardRoarkon Assembla now offers free private Git and SVN Repository Hosting

Goodbye to Github. Goodbye to the private Git repo on my VPS!

HowardRoarkon Ask HN: Grails hosting (or is 100mbit enough?)

1. Google App Engine is free to begin with, but you known the cons. 2. Rackspace Cloud Servers (21$ for 512 MB. Pay for BW separately) 3. Slicehost (Same as Rackspace Cloud Server, but 40$ for 512 MB. But you get 100 GB BW I think)

I am using 512Mb Slice, with Nginx and Jetty and MySQL on the same slice and its been working pretty well so far.

HowardRoarkon The Startup Visa Act Must Be Stopped

No it doesn't. Its just another form of slavery like H1b.

HowardRoarkon The Startup Visa Act Must Be Stopped

Does this mean I can't bootstrap my company?