WarTheatre

It seems to me that people like the marketing without actually liking the product itself. Are there any sales numbers for Old Spice?

"ooc is a modern, self-hosting, object-oriented, functional, high-level, low-level programming language. It strives to be powerful, modular, extensible, portable, yet simple and fast. ooc translates to C99 via rock, our self-hosting compiler."

Is this for real? Because it sounds like someone is overselling their langauge way too much.

Databases and SQL, everyone developer needs to know about them. They are easy to learn, incredibly ubiquitous and actually quite fun to work with. Have them start out simple by downloading MySQL and reading, say, <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/>W3 Schools tutorials</a>.

Regular expressions. Very useful no matter which area (desktop, web, mobile) you specialize in.

HCI, usability, interaction design. They should atleast know enough about usability and design to appreciate its importance and avoid The Usual Mistakes (TM).

Using and administering web server software. Learn about Apache and the most common modules (e.g. mod_rewrite) because the odds are pretty high that you'll have to set up a web server in the future.

All businesses need to embrace change. But too often people forget that change is a mindset belonging to individual people and that it therefore needs to be constantly re-rooted in the organization to actually stay relevant. If your organization doesn't remember to embrace change (document your practices!), if it doesn't constantly re-roots itself with regard to change (challenge the way you embrace change), it will become obsolete.

Regards,

WarTheatre

If scribd went out of business tomorrow, how long would it take for you to get a solution working? How much would it cost?

No, I don't think you're making a mistake, but this is a high risk decision. Personally I would at the very least look into using one of scribd's competitors as an emergency solution in case of major downtime, bankruptcy, etc.

Yes, I think this is an idea that's at least worthwhile experimenting with. Invitation based membership can be quite a powerful mechanism to ensure that HN remains a high-quality and civil place. A place where even the most controversial topics can be discussed without incivility, trolling, spamming and such.

Metafilter and Something Awful - IMHO two of the most successful general communities online - use another mechanism to weed out unwanted people: paid membership. Not only does this keep people out, but it has the psychological effect that members make an greater effort to live up to respective community's guidelines and ethos.

Now, I would gladly pay a one-time fee of around 10-15 USD to be a HN member, but I suspect that this solution wouldn't be accepted by many people. That leaves us with invitations. Knowing that I'm in some way responsible for the people that I invite to the community and that their actions reflects back at me, I will exercise more caution when handing out invitations.

Regards,

WarTheatre

The company had actually already chosen Samport, a provider mainly (only?) active on the Scandinavian market. However, Samport fulfills all requirements that I previously described.

Actually, if there are any Scandinavian developers/entrepreneurs reading this - give Samport a chance. In addition to the previously described advantages, they are also cheap and -- besides the hosted solution where customers are redirected to their servers -- allow you to seamlessly integrate Samport with your own e-commerce.

Regards, WarTheatre

This is only a problem if there are very strong mechanisms in place that encourage/force people to actively compete for karma so that they don't risk losing their status. For instance, if high karma people are given more exposure or special benefits (early access to content; free stuff, etc.), you can bet this will lead to an increase in active karma manipulation. People will simply act accordingly to get better karma, which might not always be preferably depending on the type of community you run.

Karma is very important to people online and fooling around with it can cause hurt feelings. After all, Karma is often the only explicit reward that community members receive and is a way of being recognized for being a productive, helpful, nice and ultimately good member.

Regards, WarTheatr

I'm also cautious about writing about HN on various communities I visit simply because I fear it would attract the wrong crowds, e.g. spammers, trolls and your average eternal septemberists.

Right now HN is a great community for startups, Internet businesses, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. The signal to noise ratio is very high and discussions are relevant, mostly civil and very interesting. Heck, I can't name another site with so much relevant content for Internet businesses.

Furthermore, I think it's perfectly fine that HN remains a relatively small and focus community, not every site must be like Digg or Slashdot in size.

Regards, WarTheatre

I've setup a hosted payment solution (i.e. the customer is redirected to the provider) for a minor e-commerce so I have some experience on the matter.

My recommendation would be to select a provider that: 1. is based in Germany. Having a provider that has the same business hours as you and to whom you can actually phone and talk in your own tongue is very important. When - not if - you get into trouble and require support, you need to get it ASAP, not wait for an email many hours later.

2. Provides the features, technology and support you require. You'll need a solution that accepts major credit cards, but this is raraly a problem. Equally important and often neglected, is how good the solution is techniqually. Can you work in any programming language (you should)? Are you provided with good documentation, examples, needed graphics, etc?

This is not really about perfection - which, after all, is impossible - as it's about creating high quality products, no matter how simple or complex they might be.

If the wheel was invented with today's manufacturing mindset, it wouldn't actually roll in first couple of years ("available in the 2.0 release!") and probably set half the cave on fire when actually doing so ("You did read the EULA, didn't you?").

Uhhhh, yeah, so did I :( I was looking for the options thingy and clicked the triangle. Yeah, obviously wrong.

How do you report spam on HN?

Experiense indeed! ;)