lusr

Whenever I see interesting events like this, my first thought is not "what would happen" but always "how could I profit from what would happen [or the uncertainty around it]".

Unfortunately I never know how to answer that question convincingly enough to put my money where my mouth is. Does anybody know if there's a place where people discuss these sorts of things, e.g. a "Hacker News for Financial Markets"? Any interesting ideas for coming out of this on top?

EDIT: Two answers have pointed to gold. Yup, I have already played with investing in gold ETFs, which generated a 20% return over the past 2 years, even after fees. However I was wondering if there were any more ideas specific to the present circumstances, and where, if anywhere, people discuss this sort of thing?

I was very keen on using TDD to lay out the design and technical specification of a solution to be implemented by our team (8 developers total).

Unfortunately, because the project has tight deadlines (regulatory project), despite minimal requirement clarity the team needed to get going and in the end every developer ended up with just a rough guideline of how to implement the various components.

Does anybody have ideas for integrating TDD with an Agile approach and a team around this size?

I think the following separates you from the average games player and makes your story (interesting as it is) out of place:

In the late 1990's I wrote for websites strategies and even won several tournaments and won hundreds in cash and some perks. I even attended the first World Cybergames as a MVP.

That's a productive career and time well spent; it is a fact that not everybody can have that outcome. (This reminds me of all the guys at school obsessing over football; the effect under discussion is not limited to computer games.)

For the average game player, time spent playing games is time not spent working towards some other achievement. This is precisely why I pretty much stopped playing games years ago and focus on spending my free time on other goals.

He donated the product and kept the barcode.

Here's a guy who pretty much did it for free (and he wasn't the only one): http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/02/28/credit-card-reward-po...

It's not really a "Show HN", though is it? It's an paid-for extension of an existing product. In that vein, while an informative post I did find the following statement a bit disingenuous:

"As Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and partner at Y Combinator, says, the correct order of operations is to “sell before you build.” When you launch, you want a whole list of people that you can tell to buy it. But more than that, you want to ensure that you’re investing all that time building something that people want to buy."

As far as I can tell, they built a product for 40,000 people over a certain period of time without generating a cent in profit or knowing in advance that any of those people would ever consider paying from the product. While some users did claim they wanted a team version they would pay for, this was only after the base product was built without knowing people would pay for it.

This bugs me a bit because I'm working on a project where I'd love to be able to sell before I build, as it's obviously a very sound principle, but in practice I just can't see how to go about it and I was hoping to learn something new from this post.

Another fun complication: database stored procedures implemented with non-SQL code. I worked on a project where the client's dedicated SQL ninjas managed to bring the time to process daily extracts from the data warehouse down to 2min from 45min by switching over to CLR (.NET) implementations of the calculations being performed on SQL Server 2005.

IIRC the issue was simply that MSSQL 2005 is just plain slow at doing calculations compared to C# code (the calculations were complex financial models involving large amounts of data and inter-dependencies between that data in calculations, so shipping the raw data to an application was not a viable option).

While I agree that immaculate attention to detail is important in documents you're creating for formal consumption (e.g. CVs/resumes), I don't see how the same extends to emails, websites and READMEs.

I'm a native English speaker and despite being well aware of homonym misuse, my brain doesn't always play the game and occasionally I find myself using the wrong word in my writing with no rational explanation.

Similarly, I often find myself leaving out words in my writing that I don't notice are missing even after re-reading a paragraph many times. (I fall for "PARIS IN THE THE SPRING" almost every time it comes up.)

Alternatively I'll change the wording in a sentence and not notice stray words are left over in the wrong order, again even after re-reading. Usually I have to do something else and look back at what I've written to read it with "fresh eyes". I imagine dyslexic people have similar problems.

Despite these issues I've been complimented many times on the quality of my technical writing and my code, so I don't consider my natural language issues as much of a disability when it comes to programming or technical work. That is, until I encounter somebody who holds your beliefs.

It seems obvious to me that there's a vast difference between somebody writing a CV using obviously incorrect spelling or random formatting, or inconsistent capitalisation, punctuation, tenses, etc., and somebody who makes one or two typos in a blog post on their personal home page.

You're missing the point. The question is about the legality of access without authorisation. Just because it's illegal to leave your car unlocked doesn't magically make it legal to steal from an unlocked car.

I still don't see the value. To me it's like proposing that in SQL we replace 'EXEC' with 'HEAD', 'PUT', 'DELETE'...

At the end of the day I still need to understand the contract of the stored procedure to have any hope of consuming a database API of meaningful complexity.

There isn't much in the way of discoverable APIs that adhere to the data model suggestion in the HTTP spec

I don't even understand why this needs to be pointed out. If the precise usage of all web APIs could be inferred from the verb alone, presumably all web APIs are exactly the same. That's nonsensical. I challenge anybody to honestly claim they have consumed a 3rd party web API of material complexity without once referring to the documentation and solely relying on guessing HTTP verbs.

Once you're already reading the API documentation, I don't understand why you'd prefer "http.request('PUT', '/resource')" over "http.post('/resource/put'). Even better, you can choose a URI that makes the most sense to your domain model, e.g. '/resource/upload'. I don't understand why you'd want to have less expressive URIs AND more work. In even this simple example, the verb is unlikely to be adequate in any case - if you need to supply options or metadata the verb is even less significant as to the true meaning of the operation.

The fact is you can always embed the verb of your choice into the URI - thereby making a GET/POST/HEAD world no more or less expressive than a Verbtopia world. All that extra verbs do is cause consumers of the API to have to remember two pieces of information (VERB + URI) rather than one (URI). At least URIs can be constructed to make as much semantic sense as possible within a given domain model - VERBs, on the other hand, end up as square pegs in round holes, making them far less memorable.

I'm mostly a back-end developer and I don't have much experience with rich front-end interfaces other than my own little side projects and a WPF project from about a year back - however, I do believe the same principles apply to both front- and back-end design.

Specifically, you should be following the SRP - duplicated code is a symptom that you are not. Without seeing your code that you feel doesn't pay off, it's difficult to answer your question more directly.

I will say there's no reason you can't design your server-side services to be consumed directly by the view, in which case I wouldn't see a problem referencing the service directly from the view (e.g. the UserService exposed by the server implements (a) normal login, (b) login as part of checkout and (c) registration).

Alternatively, you could build a client-side service to wrap the server-side service and reference that directly from your views (e.g. a UserController that wraps the UserService and is consumed by (a) the omnipresent login view, (b) a login/signup view, and (c) the registration view).

Over and above this, there is some middle-ground where you reuse structures. For example, a User structure (with IsAuthenticated, UserName, FullName etc.) would be assigned to a $scope.CurrentUser property for the views. Consequently you don't reimplement the User object the service implements, and you don't vaguely depend on the entire UserService, but the data contract the view does depend on from the controller is still explicit by looking at the $scope definition in the controller. Similarly, the operation contract is defined by the controller functions. This improves maintainability and readability IMO.

The problem is that the types in Javascript + dependency injected AngularJS services are hidden. If you forget that "auth.loggedIn" is a value-type, you might unconsciously assume it's a reference type. This is one reason I prefer statically-typed languages -- it's much more difficult to make this sort of mistake since the type information is always visible even if you have the most basic IDE.

1. This tightly couples the service to the view. Changes in the view and/or service will potentially result in nasty surprises and spaghetti code. For instance, what happens if the business processes change one day and "login" needs to return "logged in but email address unconfirmed"? You want the rules to deal with that scenario confined to a LoginController, not scattered around through each view (consider: an omnipresent login box view vs. a login/signup form view used when a user performs an action that potentially requires login, e.g. "Checkout")

2. In reality, this simple sample obscures what happens in the real world when you add an input for the user key & password:

a. you will need to pass the parameters to the auth service. At that point hopefully you will won't do anything crazy and will simply e.g. bind the user key & password to $scope properties, and pass the scope properties through to the auth service.

b. As stated in (1), your login & logout controller functions need to consider the result of their auth calls and map that result back to a meaningful state for the view -- in the simplest case, it'll just be "logged in" or "logged out", but it can also be e.g. "logged in but email address unconfirmed", which could require a message to be displayed to the user. The best place for this state is again a $scope property.

So, in practice you would just use a $scope.loggedIn or $scope.user property maintained by the controller login() and logout() functions to resolve this issue.

These people are using Facebook with the expectation it works like email. Why do you feel the two are so different? In my experience, the average computer user doesn't like fiddling with email addresses - Facebook is far more friendly (opportunity for a new email client?).

Email is not immune to these issues, either. This scenario is the equivalent to sending an email and having it end up in your friend's spam folder (although arguably Facebook should be more heavily invested in getting this right!)

Is this not a short-sighted view?

A middle class salary they can survive on for how long? When that source of income dries up they'll be unable to continue working on their passion without spending time and effort finding an additional source of income.

Alternatively, if they open themselves up to a strategy enabling a greater income they could potentially retire in a very short time with indefinite financial security and the option to pursue their passion as long as they like.

My machine is always on. Subjectively, having 24GB of RAM made far more of a performance difference than my Plextor PX-256M3P, presumably because with 24GB of RAM pretty much everything of importance ends up being cached in RAM sooner or later.

Why a contractor?

I'm a contractor for two reasons: (1) money and (2) because I don't buy into the corporate PR. People who work in these places have to buy into the corporate values system.

I look at corporate values with great skepticism; perhaps I'm just cynical but in big companies it always seems to end up (in performance reviews) as being a way for the company to come back and justify why your bonus, increase, etc. will fall short of expectations this year.

"CRI is not a good indicator for use in visual assessment, especially for sources below 5000 kelvin (K)."

Bulbs in question are 2700K and 5000K. Does your conclusion still hold?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

Let's dig into these numbers. Assuming the R40m value is correct over 3 years, then:

- since there are 248 working days in a South African year on average, the average daily cost ran to ~R53,763 or ~R6,720 per hour

- at the banks I've worked at, that'll buy you 10 intermediate on-site contract developers, or 6 senior developers, from an average consulting house which factors in all of these overhead expenses (including travel, etc.) you mention... and that's doing skilled development; this is WordPress work, but let's be generous and say they bill the same

It's hard to believe they required anywhere near that many developers (designers are much cheaper and I can't imagine they hired more than 1 or 2), or that hardware/service contracts would have cost much more.

How do you come to this conclusion? It doesn't appear she had much of a choice. Her two successful lawyers in a fancy, shiny, expensive office gave her this advice:

"I asked my lawyers to refuse, and we fought about it, repeatedly. They brought up things from my past that could be used against me; not criminal behavior per se, even they admitted, but they wanted me to have immunity."

Different people have different situations; no single piece of advice can apply to all people. Speaking for myself, if somebody placed me in a tricky position where my past could be used against me I would always put myself first if it meant protecting myself and my family.

Being a single mother is tough enough; being a single mother, struggling with money, involved in things you don't understand, being threatened by people with significant amounts of power (is it hard to believe eventually they would have done something to threaten her daughter?) would be enough to convince most normal people to speak. Given the information she had at the time she made a rational (debate-fully wrong) choice.

While there may be strong arguments for the case that the prosecutor's actions are unethical, ultimately Aaron's actions put her into this situation. His blaming her for her actions after being caught up in his battle, while wanting to protect herself and her child, is offensive to me.

It's sad that she beats herself up - she lost in a game she was not trained or skilled enough to win, a game somebody else forced her to play.

There are plenty of successful founders who didn't quit their jobs immediately to work on their startup. Not everybody has that luxury. Maybe you meant to limit your comment specifically to YC startups?

I just tried reading a number of articles on the front page using www.spreeder.com that another commenter here mentioned. I got up to 800wpm with chunk size of 3 before my suspicion was confirmed: while I had no problem following the story, it felt like I had a mental buffer that was constantly filling up and skipping over interesting questions or thoughts based on what I was reading.

Fundamentally, speed reading through something is at odds with processing that information in a useful way. And therein lies the rub: I don't read something merely for the sake of reading it.

When I read novels, I enjoy losing myself daydreaming in another world, and savouring the emotions of the characters while thinking about how I would react in their shoes. When I read technical documentation I'm attemping to create or update mental models of technical concepts. When I read a friend's Facebook post I think about what, if any, response I will offer or how I would deal with their situation. When I read a message from my girlfriend I have to take time to understand and plan for whatever she's discussing or asking.

I'm honestly struggling to see the value in speed reading. I cannot think of why I would be reading something simply for the sake of reading it without further processing. More valuable would be learning ways to process information more efficiently, i.e. accurately and quickly.

Perhaps this is just my opinion, but if you make a statement that you don't know to be true and assert it as a true statement, you have lied.

The StackExchange network does very well without resorting to any of these tactics.

Read his comment again. He's describing the same frustration I and apparently many others have experienced clicking on a link (from a search engine, a blog, etc.) only to hit a wall. At this point I'm not a user of the site yet. The gist of your argument is how we're using a service, etc. That's fine, they can setup their service however they choose. And we, as potential users, can point out what a poor setup they have chosen.

The irony is I have an account... linked to my Facebook profile. But I can't log in with that from work. There may or may not be a way around this (perhaps a new account or linking my account to an email login), but I'm so irritated by their antagonistic approach that when I see the wall appear I just close the browser tab.

It's now gotten to a point where I don't even bother using Quora from home because I so strongly disagree with their policy.

But then aren't you potentially giving away your competitive advantage?

Let's say I invent a new search engine, Poople. I don't have much money to patent it. But I can't keep the details secret either lest somebody else patent it. But by publishing the details defensively, my competitor with deep pockets, Paapo, goes and reimplements my algorithm and wipes me out of the marketplace.

Which part of the story did I get wrong?

And even if you move past the paralysis, trying to cure oneself of depression is like trying to debug the operating system of your mind using a debugger running the exact same flawed logic that you're trying to debug!

Worse, those bugs are live and their nature is to slowly but surely corrupt the rest of the system software pertaining to beliefs, memory, perception and thought processing. Eventually you reach a point where it's almost impossible to tell what's a lie and what's real, or how to non-dysfunctionally process what you do discover!

This is why therapy is so critical - you have an objective third party to help debug things, identify your blindspots and point out where the bugs in your beliefs and thought processes are. A reference manual for identifying and repairing dysfunctional thinking is also incredibly valuable and to that end I recommend David Burns' "Feeling Good" to anybody in this situation.

There are other reasons too.

Having been there myself, the big one I've seen in myself and with friends in similar situations is that the depressed individual feels worthless and "unfixable" at their core because of their:

- past behaviour (e.g. they did something considered seriously socially unacceptable and feel they can't tell anybody lest they be ostracised forever, or people already know about it and they are ostracised leading to feelings of no hope of escape); or

- past experiences (e.g. they have a string of failed relationships they feel responsible for and believe they'll never be happy and every day seeing happy couples on Facebook or in the shopping mall is like a stab in the heart).

At the root of it is hopelessness, which also covers:

- future expectations (e.g. they're trapped in a very bad situation, e.g. money, relationship, crime, etc., and can see no way of escape)

In these desperate situations, they feel too guilty, hopeless, ashamed and/or disgusted to discuss their circumstances with anybody, and besides, in their minds, it wouldn't accomplish anything because they "know" they're broken ("I can't live with myself after what I did", "Alice was the only person who could love somebody like me", etc.) or screwed ("I can't go to prison", "If anybody ever finds out I'll never get a decent job/lover ever again", "Nobody can replace Alice, I screwed up forever", etc.) and there's no way out.

Perhaps the saddest thing about suicidal depression is that many (note: I'm not claiming all, or even a majority, OR in the case of Aaron OR Jody, simply 'many'!) of these scenarios seem to stem from a dysfunctional belief system and a lack of introspective coping skills that I imagine could easily be taught, in the form of life skills based on cognitive behavioural therapy, to school teenage children. Many parents lack these skills (through no fault of their own), and pass dysfunctional beliefs and thought processes onto their children (entirely unconsciously).

It's fascinating to me that such a serious problem - the #2 non-biological cause of death, behind road traffic accidents - receives so little real attention [1]. People get upset about wars, murders, have extensive fire safety requirements, covers for their pools, hide their poison and medicines from children, panic over their children being abducted or falling pregnant etc., yet suicidal depression? I don't believe I knew a thing about it until I had to learn quickly - to help myself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate

I was under the impression Zencoder already runs on the AWS infrastructure:

* https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/isv/zencoder

* http://gigaom.com/2011/04/12/zencoder-raises-2m-for-cloud-ba...