crystalarchives

I'll have to second not using an IDE; I use (g)vi(m) instead.

It forces me to understand each step of the development process, reduces the overhead of any machine I work on, and allows me to work on pretty much any server, anywhere, using just Putty/Terminal.

Interestingly, I also try to minimize the amount of customization I do, sticking instead with the defaults so I can easily work in new environments. I'm not sure if that's unconventional though.

It does look very similar to the YC sites, but that's not a bad thing at all - it looks very good, intuitive and beautiful.

I'm not worried about him not knowing what a tar file is - fine, he likes Windows, whatever.

What greatly disturbs me is his choice of text editor. Notepad? Seriously?! If you've only programmed with IDEs or Notepad, that is a serious problem. I love vi, and am competent in emacs, but even in a Windows environment he should go for Notepad++ or something...

I wish I could upmod this so many times... Amazing article, everyone should read the entire thing.

I hated math throughout school, although I was told I was "good at it", even though I had no clue what was going on. Now I know why!

What can we do about this?!

I personally like ASmallOrange; they're a small gig, but their customer service is AMAZING - I've been hacking, had a problem at 1 am in the morning, emailed them about it and got it fixed in half and hour - three times already.

www.asmallorange.com

Their prices are reasonable, too, and the shell access is great, but the speed isn't blazing, although very acceptable. You should be fine if you're not too graphics intensive.

Take a deep breath, pat yourself on the back, and prepare for round two: gaining traction.

Genius man, it's a good idea and looks fantastic.

Good luck to you, too!

Ouch, I see it now:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...

"May not compensate users for viewing ads or performing searches, or promise compensation to a third party for such behavior"

I guess this is why there are other sites that use Yahoo as the search engine for the same purpose... Thanks for the heads up, I'll let you know if I find some way around it. I think I'll leave it up and wait until Google contacts me before switching to Yahoo.

Who knows, maybe I'll write something that allows verification of donations for charities. That might be a good non-profit in itself.

Hm, where I am breaching Google TOS? I've read through it pretty carefully, although I'm not a lawyer, and I can't find anything besides potentially incentivizing the clicking of ads. That is up to their discretion, I'm going to assume it's okay unless they warn me. I've put up a disclaimer though, thanks for pointing that part out.

I'm able to disclose my earnings though Section 7 of the TOS (http://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms) which states:

"You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program."

and I can post my donation receipts for verification. Obviously, this won't happen until after I get the AdSense check, but there's nothing I can do about that for the first month. There won't be many users starting off though, so even if I were a greedy scumbag I wouldn't make too much, and if I actually do as I promise more users will hopefully show up.

Interestingly, I've never really been to Digg or Reddit, so all this "fluff" is foreign to me. The content here has always been good, I hope it stays that way.

I guess most people (myself included) found news.ycombinator.com through the Paul Graham essays and the YCombinator program. As a result, I'm not too worried about fluff; I think those who read PG essays won't be inclined to post garbage, and karma helps as well to encourage good content. Keep up the awesome work here guys!

I try to maximize productivity and efficiency; if I have a lot of time, I do something I'm less familiar with since I'll probably have to look things up and experiment, without losing state. If I just have a little bit of time, I work on the parts I know I could do in my sleep, so if I get interrupted it's no big deal, I can easily pick up where I left off.

But most importantly, I try never to procrastinate, although I don't always succeed... Good luck!

Yeah, unfortunately cookies are required for the site to track your contributions. Most people nowadays have cookies enabled so I think it should be okay, but good for you that you're very security and privacy conscious. Thanks again for the feedback, it's much appreciated.

Thanks for the feedback - could you be more specific about the scoring system? What doesn't work well? What would you like to see implemented?

Great point; I was hoping my per-action cost to be around $0.09, which is roughly 10 times FreeRice's (pre-increase) cost of 10 grains, since it takes awhile to solve a sudoku puzzle.

Do you have any ideas on what would be a good single click or trivial action? I don't want to copy FreeRice outright, but I am having trouble brainstorming for other activities for the user. Perhaps a quiz about water cleanliness?

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm a college student working at my university's tech support desk while doing freelance web design jobs on the side while simultaneously working on my startups. www.playforcleanwater.com