saundby

Others missed but useful for beginners:

BlueJ (Java), Arachnophilia (HTML/C/Java)

Bookshelves, an entertainment center, lots of medieval armor, several homebrew computers (I'm putting the finishing touches on an 8085 now: saundby.com), a couple of fish tanks, my computer desk, a parallelogram mount for my binoculars, several telescopes, including the primary optics.

Building is just another part of hacking. If you asked me what I'd modded, I'd have an even larger list. I originally got into electronics and computers because it was a cheaper hobby than model railroading. I couldn't afford railroading stuff from the hobby shop, but I could always find a broken radio to get parts out of for electronics projects, and make money repairing radios and TVs until I could afford a microprocessor. :)

A can of Diet Coke and a banana.

I seldom eat before noon, when I do it's usually a piece of fruit.

Not I. But then, those famous bloggers are famous for managing to do so, in part, right?

I think part of the idea is that you also earn money off of products that result from the blog, as well as the blog itself. If your articles roll nicely into books that can sell, for example. Or sell t-shirts. Or if you have a webcomic with characters you can sell as plushies. All the little things add up to a living when you use the blog properly.

If that's what you want to do, those really famous bloggers are worth looking into, at least the ones who earned their fame as bloggers, but the ones who earned fame then became bloggers will have to do the right things, too, to make blogging pay off enough to keep doing that, as opposed to earning money off their fame in some other way.

Each language tends to have particular problems it's most used to solve. They may not even be what the language is most suited for. Figure out what sort of programs you want to write, then search on that to see what others use. There'll be overlap, so look at the resources, figure out which seem to make the most sense to you, then pick the language that matches.

At first, your choice of language isn't all that critical so long as you start out with some resources you've turned up that'll let you get some of those first projects completed. Then you'll be good enough at formulating ideas then implementing them to make a more informed choice. Either you'll be comfortable enough with your chosen language's idiom to solve problems even if they don't necessarily align with the language's strengths, or you'll have a better basis to pick a new language that addresses your problems with the first language. After some initial discomfort, if you've picked well the new language will start to feel handy and expressive in a short while.

Any of the major languages can be taken on by the new programmer, I usually recommend one of Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java, or Groovy. The resources for beginners are good, the user communities are supportive, and they're all expressive enough to create powerful programs.

There are lots of other good languages--no knocks on them--these are just my favorites presently. I teach programming to non-programmers, BTW.

Once you pick a language, come back and ask for resources for that language. ;)

There's always a lag time between accomplishment and external validation. Sometimes it's brief, but more often it's not. In my own case I'm used to it being on the order of two years or so. ;)

My recommendation is to learn to be satisfied with the results when you have created them. Be your own first judge, and if you feel you've done a good job on something from as objective a viewpoint as you can get, enjoy that. Reward yourself somehow, and take someone else along who'll at least lend a sympathetic ear and share your enthusiasm. Get yourself a nice dinner out, buy that expensive book you've been wanting, whatever.

Then plunge back in and do some more, while you still feel good.

Perhaps that's because the article isn't about the formation of galaxies but about the perception of what a galaxy is?

Besides, it's a fairly long post without even getting into the nuts and bolts of astrophysics. ;)

I think it depends on the business model.

I've seen a strong correlation in some areas, where the entrepreneur's business relied on lots of contacts and sales through contacts. But I've also seen success by what you would consider non-social types, the sort that go into a hole, work their tookus off, emerge with something valuable, then sell it through non-social methods like online and mail order.

The strongest entrepreneurships I've seen combine different people with complementary skills.

Try sources like the Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/). There are plenty of current titles available legally and for free there and elsewhere if Gutenberg doesn't suit your tastes.

Scholarships, loans, and work is how I did it. The scholarships covered tuition, loans and earned income covered living, lab fees, and books. I lived in a small apartment complex and acted as an assistant manager in lieu of rent part of the time. I sold calligraphy (certificates, your name in calligraphy, mailboxes and street signs) and art (illuminated love poems/poison pen poems, decorated letterhead designs, wedding invitation designs) and did some studio portraiture photography. I also graded a billion papers, did odd jobs on and off campus--I.D. photos, repairs, hauling, cleanup, drafting home additions/remodels, writing short pieces for newspapers on events, selling cartoons to newsletter editors, stereo repairs, typewriter repairs.

I also got fed by friends in clubs (historical recreation group, astronomy club, computer club) when all I could afford for myself was a sack of potatoes (no margarine, just salt.) I checked out textbooks from multiple libraries to get through the quarter without buying (interlibrary loans make this work, along with reading ahead and study groups where you can get exercises from others during gaps.)

The loans were hard to swallow at the time, but I used the money carefully and it worked out.

I open in new tabs, read the articles closing each tab as I go. When I get back to the HN page I go top to bottom and vote up the articles I wish to. Then I go to next page or reload for newer stuff for as long as I'm reading.

Works better than going article by article for me, I find.

You might try a sculpting class at your local community college. It'll get you some basic skills, resources to use, and be inexpensive. Talk to the teacher at some point in class about what you'd like to do. If more of your ideas run this way you'll have a good start.

My prototypes usually start out on engineering paper, get a few quick 3D CAD drawings, then get made up in polymer clay as a form for a mold for shell casting. The 3D step is new, and hasn't eliminated the clay stage, where I still catch problems and see new opportunities that the computer doesn't bring out for me.

So I'll make a solid item out of polymer clay, then press that into more clay to make a negative mold. Then I make a shell casting by putting mold release on the negative form, pouring in some liquid acrylic, and wobbling the mold in my hand to let the acrylic build up a shell over the whole surface. There are other ways I use, too, but this is a favorite quick and dirty method.

There are books on plastic casting that teach the basics, but there's nothing like hands on in a class with an instructor, even if all you're doing in the class is learning the basic sculpting skills and tools.

English is my primary language, but I also picked up a fair bit of German and Danish as a child from my grandparents.

I mostly think in English when programming, but when I get into either specific relationships between elements of the program or high level conceptualization I tend to slip into German. Names for objects often come out in Danish if I don't stop and translate them into English.

In college I had some unfortunate partners on a programming project who were subjected to code written late at night and very quickly with comments in both English and German and with many Danish identifiers. Fortunately they were up to the task, and as they were Italian and Norwegian with English as a second language, they gave as good as they got with the multi-lingual coding.

Our professor requested a full English translation to accompany our source when we turned it in.

I use an EEE 701. I mostly work at the command line with Vi for programming. Occasionally I'll look at code in KWrite. If I need an IDE, I often use Arachnophilia, which is a pretty stripped down but easy to configure IDE that recognizes syntax for a number of languages.

You can also use Eclipse or NetBeans, but it takes a lot of configuring. For myself, I ended up taking both off my drive, since I found that I was doing most of my work in a terminal window even after I'd cleared up a reasonable amount of screen space in both.

It depends on what you want from your dev environment.

And if distraction is a problem, turn off wireless. ;)

I'll be interested in what folks have to say, too. I have a Nokia 3650 I'm looking to replace. It's been a nice system for years, but it's time to move on. The main thing I've missed on the 3650 is a keyboard. Actually coding on the system is prohibitively slow except for the shortest bug fixes or constant changes. T-Mobile's data service has been good and affordable for me, so at this point I'm not looking to change providers.

If the Nokia 810 had a phone I'd get one in a heartbeat.

I'm not just looking for tech articles, there's DZone for that. Rather, what I value more from HN is the first person viewpoint, rather than the commoditized views channeled through a reporter/editor to serve a general audience, rather than one personally engaged.

That said, there are general audience articles that I think are significant because they reflect a viewpoint that's important to to entrepreneurs. But they're few enough among the submissions that I'm scanning URLs before I even click, tending to avoid NYT, businessweek, etc. since my experience is my time is better spent elsewhere. I can get the mass media viewpoints off my Wii. ;)

I don't mind the "rate my start-up" questions that have a clear question about something specific that can be evaluated and responded to directly. Things like "here's what we're trying to do here and how, how effective do you think we're being at this?" as opposed to an open-ended "rate my start-up" with a url where we're supposed to do a top to bottom review to solve their business or presentation problems for them.

I had a similar experience with my hand-coded pages being nuked by Frontpage users at work some years ago. I just kept my own copies, and made all my changes to those. Anything that had been touched by Frontpage wouldn't get updated, it became a dead branch.

I would bring in changes that had happened in Frontpage, but from scratch by hand, not by importing any of Frontpage's code.

I also worked on my boss by setting up an internal A/B comparison site, where internal users could choose which page they liked better. They voted on whichever they liked, with no indication to them of which page has hand-coded and which was worked over by automated tools. When I had over 800 votes in less than a week, with 95% voting for the hand-coded pages and _all_ the user comments saying why they preferred them, I was able to get my boss to agree to keep the tools off my hand-written code for all but a couple of pages in the site.

I also wrote some scripts to generate new pages that were maintainable where there was a need to create new content on the fly, eliminating one of the big excuses for the Frontpage nukes ("You were out of the office, we had to post, and all they know is Frontpage!")

Good luck!

Personally I find nearly all the mass-media submissions to be a dilution, no matter how techie or startup they sound. NY Times, WSJ, etc. They're written for too broad an audience compared to the focused info I expect to find on HN.

My Eee PC has pretty well replaced my MacBook as my portable. It's smaller than what you're looking at, though there are larger models out now like the Eee PC 1000. Linux is already on them, no Windows Tax necessary if you buy a Linux preinstall. Dev tools install easily, or you can get a different distro that already has what you want, there are several that are tuned for Eee's.

A large part of the reason my Eee goes with me rather than my MacBook is that it's a lot more robust than the MacBook. I can treat the Eee pretty much the same way I would treat a book when I take it with me. It's a solid little chunk, and it cost about 1/4 what my MacBook cost.

DZone (http://www.dzone.com/) The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/) Not exactly a community site, though there are enough good comment threads that it does a good imitation of one.

IDEs are useful for helping you match tags, see what part of your page is affected by which tags, and checking your HTML. They're also just handy as editors, e.g. they allow you to open multiple files simultaneously (e.g. your html file in one tab and your stylesheet in another.)

Not that there's anything wrong with vi. I use it and an IDE.

You might want to give Arachnophilia a try. It's simple, configurable, multiplatform, and does more than HTML/CSS: http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/

Amaya is prettier, and focused on web page design: http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

Neither one breaths fire like the big IDEs, but both do a great job on what they do. ;)

I have an Eee PC 4g model 701 and both my 13 and 16 year old love it, and are aching to have one of their own. They're both saving up to buy themselves 2Gs, though if the prices keep falling they may be able to afford something better.

I get along with the screen and keyboard fine, they don't even notice that they might be a problem.

I think they make great systems for kids this age.

The site as a whole is a good start, I'd say. I like the filter setup, it may get unwieldy as the number of languages/subjects multiplies, so you'll want to think ahead on scaling.

I think a little less text in the bubbles on the about page is a good idea. You can catch it all in the backup text below if you've caught the reader with the short version above. But the page layout looks pretty good overall. Maybe give it one more coat of polish, then try a couple of divergent ideas and mock them up, then ask us to take a look and compare?

I'll admit to being favorably prejudiced toward your site's purpose, BTW, so my response may be more enthusiastic than you'd get from most of your targets. ;)

I'm religious, but I'm seldom willing to discuss it in technical forums because of the responses it draws. Specifically those who feel it their mission to, first, tell me what it is I must believe, then, tell me why it's foolish to believe those things.

There are a lot of folks who feel tech forums are an appropriate place to make atheistic comments or anti-religious statements, probably because they feel like they're among a receptive audience. I think this gives an unbalanced impression of how far the split is to one side or the other. For myself, I just ignore the statements. It's not about what I'm in a tech forum for. And I don't consider it any more indicative of where the group mind is than statements on, say, film preferences.

Start doing some part-time businesses now. Get with classmates, especially classmates outside your major, put together something quick and dirty and see if you can make a few bucks. You'll learn what you need to complement your skills & personality and get some experience balancing different parts of your life, going through the whole business start-deliver-grow-falter-fail cycle. Invaluable experience and killer resume/interview material.

For social groups, find groups _outside_ of college. You'll be able to connect with people at all stages of life, and you won't be an outsider the day you graduate. Find something with a worldwide presence, whether it's the group or just the activity itself. I did medieval re-enactment, I connected with not only other medievalists worldwide, but all historical enthusiasts. Travel? Free room and board and often transport from the more established co-enthusiasts. Instant networking, too--jobs, advice, backing, prospects, you name it.