aichcon

I still prefer pen and paper for notes, sketches, and mockups - I find the process of writing the thought down imprints it much better in my memory than typing it and that helps me comprehend the problem better.

Looks very promising! Can you tell us about the customer development process you went through for this? Did you get a chance to speak to reporters or newspapers about their needs or the chances of them partnering with you, or are you going for individual early adopters for now? Best of luck.

"Based on the iPhone OS" doesn't mean it IS the iPhone OS.

I like the idea. I think it would be better illustrated with shorter lines, though.

Seems like I've been hearing about the death of RSS a lot in the past two years, but as an avid Google Reader user, I can't imagine not having RSS today.

The article states: "I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me."

Anyone else do this? How would Twitter be a more useful way to monitor news?

I think it's a nice thought, but I don't think a lack of hosting is what's stopping people here from getting their ideas out.

You should have a vision for your product that is your north star, but for less 'big picture' features, let your users do your prioritization for you. Proactively communicate with them and keep track of feature requests. The frequent requests will bubble up - focus on those.

I agree that it enforces the spirit of the community. One of my first comments was a joke and it was down-modded hard (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684509). This quickly taught me the community's expectations in terms of quality of comments.

Smart boards seem like many lazy school boards' way of saying, "Here, now we can say we're up to speed in terms of technology." My high school did the same thing, and they were never used, but always brought up in school presentations.

Investing that money into getting an excellent technology administrator or computer science teacher would have made much more of a difference.

I don't think he should reject it. Rejecting it would be an insult and spur unnecessary controversy. He should accept it with grace and move on.

Curious, could you please share how you are covered and the cost? COBRA, Freelancer's Union, something else?

It would also be interesting to be notified when a certain user posts a comment - I have a competitor on this site and want to track his posts :) Nice site!

It's been under construction for several years now.

Seriously - this is making me consider a switch.

Yes, but the point is that it would be done on Facebook, whose user base is much larger and more connected.

How would you rewrite it?

I'm curious - what are people's experiences with controlling bounce rates on sites that extensively use AJAX? A user could easily visit my page and browse a great deal of content without a second page request needing to be called. As I understand it, even if they spent 10 minutes using the AJAX functionality and left, they would count as a bounce.

I essentially see it as a tradeoff between usability and SEO-friendliness, but I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on it. I've considered doing something where the first click would perform a page refresh but subsequent calls would fall back onto the AJAX functionality but that seems a bit silly.

Not necessarily true. He may just be prioritizing releasing new functionality and sites over improving the design for now.

A similar article was written by the Times in February 09 titled 'You try to live on 500k in this town': http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/style/09iht-08halfmill.200...

Not a native but I attended CMU and I love the town.

The iPad would be interesting ...

If someone does make a viral video out of this, I'm interested to see how many days will be lost due to delays :)

Perhaps you're right, but if I was going to release a book and put my name on it, I would want it to be designed by a professional. Books are definitely judged by their covers.

I agree that spec work is nonsense, but these things have a way of working themselves out. If you want quality, you have to pay for it, and quality designers will charge you for it. Many times the parties who ask for spec work don't really care much for quality and thus will attract the kind of talent that is willing to do spec work. They'll get what they pay for.

I suspect the time and energy Tim spends trying to organize the book contest, look through the submissions and filter out the garbage would have been better spent just contacting a reputable designer and paying them to do a good job.

Check out joshu's profile.

It just doesn't matter. If it's bad enough it'll be flagged. Adding arbitrary and reactive rules to the system is only going to hurt it.

Why do you use Opera? I just can't see the benefit.

This article makes a distinction between mature companies and startups, but I think the most important distinction is between simple web projects and startups.

The difference between a personal project and a startup is that a startup has a primary goal of profit, whereas the personal project may just be for fun or a personal exercise.

The problem is internal legacy applications that only work in IE6. If they upgrade browsers the apps break, so in order to support these apps they keep IE 6. The question for them is 'do we spend time and money to update all of our applications to upgrade a browser, or just leave things the way they are for now?'

"Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., admitted he downloaded and distributed 30 songs. The only issue for the jury to decide was how much in damages to award the record labels. ... Under federal law, the recording companies were entitled to $750 to $30,000 per infringement. But the law allows as much as $150,000 per track if the jury finds the infringements were willful."

So at $675,000 / 30 songs, the jury decided that each track was worth $22,500?

I understand that copyright laws should exist. But it really bothers me that not only were such high values set in the laws, but that the jury enforced them even though they had the option of choosing lesser amounts.

A part of the jury's job is to provide an additional, more 'human' interpretation of the case ... in this case I think they failed.