rivo

I remember when I was six, my dad programmed a chess game on the Sinclar ZX81. He used to play real-life chess a lot so naturally, this was his first use for this little box. It was slow as hell and he had to pause screen rendering to make it faster. If you call simple backtracking "AI" then I think my dad wrote that "greatest program ever" too without knowing David Horne. (And my dad is definitely no urban myth, either...)

"The Decade in Design" and not a single image in this blog post?

It's just a small thing but I think doing a screencast when you're having a cold kind of puts people off. It made me think there was snot on the keyboard.

Depending on OP's history, I may disagree.

When I graduated in CS with an M.Sc. I said to myself that I didn't see myself in a cubicle coding along all day. I'm also more outgoing than the average hacker so I wanted to work with people more than with machines. So I applied for all the "wrong" jobs. (My thesis was about usability so I applied for usability engineering positions, competing with psych graduates etc. while the industry was desparately looking for programmers with my background.)

It was good that I couldn't get the job I wanted, forcing me to take on a programming job. I became a project manager within three years and a product manager in a larger company within five years. I didn't program anymore at my day job during that time.

But I realized I did love programming so I started all kinds of side projects and kept up with technology even though it was not needed much for my job.

What I'm saying is, you may not have discovered it yet. Get a programming job and if you really do hate it, get promoted to some management position (it's often easier than you would suspect because most hackers don't want to do management). I know quite a few people who did that. They're doing a good job and they're happy not having to code anymore.

Wasn't there also a StackOverflow clone? Can anyone point me to it?

Elderly people have never been my primary source for facts or technical instructions. I went to the library or asked experts any age before the Internet came around. It's the experience and the subsequent insight which is extremely hard to replace by technology.

Real life example: I'm always in search of good recipes. For sure, there are tons of good recipes out there. But there are even more bad ones out there. In my experience, user rating systems only help to a limited degree. Even then, I'm facing a long web search and I typically have to try many of them out before I arrive at a good one. On the other hand, I collect recipes from grandmothers and grandfathers. They have never failed me. Why? Because they've been practicing them for 50 years.

Anyone have an example for a "project questionnaire" such as the one mentioned?

This is HN so I assumed an early startup environment. But of course as the startup grows, this will change. So I'm also looking at it long-term.

me too

German pop music. Formerly major label.

http://www.rivodrei.de/

The first album was recorded and mixed in Logic. The second album was recorded with Logic but the engineer who is currently mixing it switched to ProTools. The music itself is all handmade by us, the musicians.

I quit a well paid job in IT to do this full-time a few years back when we got signed. I guess the experience was much like being an entrepreneur.

Can anyone point us to some code examples? I had a hard time finding any.

My first test was "6.2.2009" and it said "June 2, 2009" where I expected "Feb 6, 2009". So it'll be only usable for an American audience.

Wow, it took me about five minutes to find out what this is. The headline certainly doesn't say it. The faq doesn't answer it, the wiki has no such information. I had to fire up Acrobat Reader first, download the PDF manual, and scroll down a few pages. If it hadn't been for the upvotes on HN, I would've completely missed it...

I don't get some of the analogies in the presentation. Like, how can I run a music production with an iPod? I'm also not so sure the sides of the brain comparison really captures what they want to say.

People keep asking me about my Vibrams, telling me how cool they look. If "socially accepted" means blending in, then of course, you're right. But I've never had a "what a weirdo" reaction. (I live in Berlin, Germany, and there are far weirder looks here.)

I've had mine for about a year now. I just wear them like that, I don't use them to run. I like them a lot.

I wonder if there's any speed improvement compared to XP/Vista after you've installed a dozen applications. It's almost ridiculous that it takes my PC up to five minutes from pushing the power button before I can start working.

I find it particularly interesting that most of the businesses covered here run at a profit margin of about 10%. I guess it is safe to say that many of us believe that the margins of successful software/Internet businesses can be much higher than that. At the same time, when seeing these examples, I wonder how realistic this is for the average profitable startup.

You can run the simulations on your computer as a screensaver: http://www.spiderland.org/screensaver

Good question. As far as I know, you always have to pay the GEMA when you put tracks registered with the GEMA on your website, free or not.

The "nonsense song" was recorded by ourselves during a rehearsal so it's pretty much just the three of us. On our first album, there are many more additional instruments, background vocals, and overdubs. That was when we were with SonyBMG. Our producers wanted to get that commercial radio sound (which didn't help much in retrospect, it was still too rough for German radio - go figure).

Our fans often say it's too much and they'd rather like the raw sound of our live concerts. I think the next album will be a lot more like that. (Still more than just three tracks, though.)

I'm here as a hacker rather than a musician so I didn't put the band URL in my profile. Anyway, this is the band: http://www.rivodrei.de. We're German so most of you won't understand the lyrics. (There's some English information here: http://www.rivodrei.de/en/) That's also one of the reasons it's on a much smaller scale than you would expect.

These are a few things we did:

-I built this website as a community website early on. There's some additional material when you sign up (e.g. demo recordings etc.). You can find out which other fans went to the same concerts and communicate with them. There's a shop, guestbook, Google Maps integration, galleries, and a forum. Couldn't find any off-the-shelve package that did all of this together so I had to code it myself.

-All our videos are zero budget. People like them anyway (they don't care about quality so much). We're currently shooting more videos for our new album.

-We gave away a few tracks in the past and I'd like to do it for our next album which is due in the fall. But like I said, I have a feeling I will fail to convince my drummer/bassist.

-Remix contest: http://www.rivodrei.de/remix/ (And yes, we could give away all individual tracks of all songs but the demand doesn't seem to be as high as for the no-drums version where everything else is pre-mixed.)

-Live webcasting from the studio during our recordings for the new album (via former Mogulus.com).

-Some fun stuff such as this one: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/01/the-... (This is in English, btw.)

-We try to collect email addresses as much as we can, especially at concerts. Newsletters are sent about once a month and people can opt out any time.

-About the use of Flash: There's a little box at the top right with pictures of live concerts. I have a feeling that people thought they were ads because of the animation.

-We have a MySpace page but for many months now, we've been attracting mostly spam. I am considering deleting our profile there. We haven't used Twitter yet because it hasn't taken off that much in Germany yet but when it does, we will use it more. We have a Facebook page and that seems to gain some traction now. YouTube is doing ok. No Flickr account. (We have our own gallery and I'm too lazy to post all pictures twice.) I like to focus on our own website because all these services come and go.

-I answer all (serious) emails. This is very important. And it's funny how excited some people are to get an email from the singer and not from some management. ;)

It takes a lot of time to shoot on all these channels and create new material (music/videos) at the same time. I'm not doing this full-time so unfortunately, there's not much time left for something else.

This is the most spot-on "tutorial" for today's musicians I've read so far. As a musician (formerly on a major label) with a hacker background, I agree with every single word. It is still hard for musicians, however, to give away their music for free, especially if money was spent producing it.

My band has been working the way described here for 3-4 years now. We're not famous but we have our fan base and we know there are people willing to pay for stuff. It's not enough to cover our living expenses but maybe we'll get there one day. Next stop: ramen-profitable...

Still, as the only Internet-savvy member in the band, it's hard to explain this to my band mates. E.g. we get lots of requests from dummers for our songs without the drum tracks so they could play along. They'd pay much more than for a regular album. And they'd upload videos to YouTube which would be free promotion for us. But I cannot get our drummer to agree to releasing these versions.

Most musicians don't get it. Yet.

Living in the moment doesn't necessarily exclude planning for the future. But it should exclude obsessing about the future. There's only so much planning you can do in this very moment (and it's usually not much, think about how long it really takes to come up with a plan or solution for the first time). Looping over it again and again will not change anything. It'll only make you miss what's happening now.

Once I tell people, however, I find myself waiting for those other people's questions about my progress. And if I don't get them, I do lose motivation although the reasons for them not asking me could be any (e.g. they didn't really understand or they're too busy with themselves).

So once I put it out there, I tend to constantly look for external validation even though I might not want to. It's not my own anymore.

Taht's pretty much my experience. Being a musician myself, I tend not to have problems with female attention in Western countries. I also met lots of Chinese girls in my life and they looked at me like they felt sorry I couldn't do better than that.

I'd don't like to generalize but that's what happened to me. And I'd like to add that Chinese != Japanese (re: Yoko Ono).

Sounds to me like the product of many years of evolution with many developers working on it, and all that at a large company. Working at a large company myself, I see how these messed up pieces of code / specifications come into being every day.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...

The Definitive Book of Body Language http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Book-Body-Language/dp/05538...

+1 to How to Win Friends & Influence People

E-Readers. Improved resolution, better usability, a sleek design, and an SDK could make it the iPod for text. Combine this with an iTunes-like model for newspaper articles, PDFs, feeds, and books of independent authors and you may even have a business model.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/04/17/Man-jumps-from-plane-... "The Adlair Aviation's two pilots said the man became agitated aboard the King Air 200 turboprop plane Wednesday night, and both tried to calm him down. However, about 110 miles before landing, the man managed to pry open a door and jump out, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported."

I sent some of pg's essays to other musicians. Replace startup with band, website with music, VC with major label, $ million with $ thousand, and you get a surprisingly accurate description of the music business, its people, and the hype.