warwick

As a writer, were there any benefits to you to grant that permission? Or was it more along the lines of there being no downside and it's nice to be asked?

You tell your boss something along the lines of "I've never worked with Perl before, and I don't think I'm going to be able to complete the project with the time we've budgeted, since it can take some time getting up to speed with a new language." Then you present options iike using a language you're comfortable in, or lengthening the time that's available for the project.

Often part of a technical job, particularly a technical job with any interesting work or responsibility, is educating your boss about the true costs associated with a decision so that they can make good decisions. If they want you to do it in Perl, that's fine, they're paying for the time and you've informed them why it will cost more than they thought. It's a good idea to follow up with an email restating this so that there's a written record you can point to later when the project falls through.

Honestly, I had expected that you'd refused a project that was unethical or illegal, not that you'd just decided you weren't interested in the stack they wanted you to use. If you told me that story during an interview, I certainly wouldn't hire you. It shows a level of inflexibility as a developer that makes me seriously question if the reason you refused the work is because you're not capable of picking up another language.

Five years ago I was at HOPE Number Six and Michael Hart was the Saturday keynote speaker, giving a talk on his work at Project Gutenberg.  I didn't know very much about it, but I recognized the name.  There were Project Gutenberg discs floating around the conference so I snagged one and had a look.

I don't really remember anything specific from the talk, but I remember it was inspiring.  It was called "Using eBooks to Break Down the Bars of Ignorance and Illiteracy".  There's audio of the talk online, and I think I need to hear it again.

The next day was the last day of the conference, and as was usual Jello Biafra was the getting far less attention than the other keynote speakers.  They'd closed off the back part of the main hall, a hall which had been filled to capacity and then some for Michael, and some of us were tossing around beach balls.  I pounded one particularly hard and hit some guy in the back of the head with it.  When he turned around I recognized Michael.  I don't think he was too happy with me in that moment.

With the eloquence that only a twenty year old can muster, I stuck my hand out and said "I love your work.  It's fucking absurd."  That's about the highest compliment I can give a person, and I'm glad to see that Shaw quote in the obituary.  It says what I was awkwardly trying to express.

The tension drained out of the situation, and he shook my hand before turning back to his companion and returning to his conversation.  I went back to playing with beach balls.

I admire what Michael built, and I admire how he did it.  Project Gutenberg was slow but steady, and will continue past his death.  I can only aspire to leaving that kind of a legacy.

Goodbye Michael.  I loved your work.  It's fucking absurd.

I really don't like the bias in the headline. It seems to imply that coding isn't something you'd do after you got growth.

Why not "How Coding Helps Y Combinator Manage Growth" or "Paul Graham Keeps Coding to Help Y Combinator Keep Growing"?

I took an awful lot of graduate level courses as an undergrad. Most of the time there was some sort of additional vetting where the prof had to sign off on your involvement in advance.

You don't have to get very far in the undergrad before they'll start letting you take the interesting stuff, especially if it looks like you know what you're doing.

That's superb then. My big concern for any project like this is that maintenance and upkeep costs end up outstripping the initial layout by a considerable amount.

Are you planning on maintaining these? In my city the route timings change depending on school schedules and time of year, so the transit schedule's that are posted at stops have to be swapped out three or four times a year.

A minor bug: One of your tabs is labelled IFrame, and seems to link to the contents of your iFrame.

3.2 for my app that needs interface builder plug-ins, and 4.whatever-the-latest-is for my other stuff. My general rule with all things Apple is to keep at the forefront of what's available, unless you have a very good reason not to. Apple isn't sentimental about dropping support for older products.

You're thinking of trademarks, not copyright.

If it has potential to cause customer confusion, it might be a trademark violation. A company is required to defend their trademarked terms, otherwise they may become generic terms.

(Standard I Am Not a Lawyer disclaimer. Go talk to a real one if you're worried.)

If you think the background and the font together are going to make a change, then by all means, conduct a test and see if whichever metric you're working with goes up. I'm in favour of isolating changes as much as possible, but if you believe that two elements of your design work only in concert with each other, then they should be modified accordingly. These aren't random permutations you test, they're new tweaks to a design that you suspect might help.

Sure, changing the font may be meaningless, but at least with a test, you KNOW it's meaningless. I try to let experience and taste guide my changes, but without checking that the change is effective you're just guessing.

Design exists to further a goal. Sometimes the goal is brand related, which I'll admit is just about impossible to measure, and sometimes it's seeing if you can reduce the frequency of support requests. One of these is obviously a better candidate for A/B testing.

[Edited to fix a spelling error]

Asking if design makes a difference is kind of a silly question. We know it makes a difference. Using A/B testing, or even just by changing one element at a time, we can measure improvements in things like conversion ratios or download rates.

Of course, to measure if each part of your design is effective, you have to change it in isolation. I wouldn't surprised if there are elements of the new Wordpress site that decrease conversion, as well as some which are increasing it. If the design had been iterated on, instead of just rolling out the new design, we might know which elements should have been changed to create better results.

He mentions they're using Eclipse. The store is written with Java/WebObjects.

Dick isn't the source of most of the ideas discussed in the article.  Minority Report is a pretty short read, and well worth the hour or two it takes.

Social Advertising: There isn't any advertising.  The only media that's referenced is the radio which is a broadcast medium, and as such can't be individually tuned.

Virtual Shopping: Anderton buys some essentials at a drugstore, and a second hand set of clothes.  It's important to the plot of the story that he takes the risk of exposing himself to get these items.

Crime: Alright, I'll give you that one.  Pre crime is a cool concept.

Robots: The only automatic machines mentioned in the story are those that tend to the needs of the pre cogs (presumably life support type stuff) and things like automatic card printers.  Hardly robotic spiders.

Gesture Based Computing: In the story, Anderton has to lookup where data will be stored on a tape and manually copy it to another reel of tape.  That's as close as he gets to a cool interface.

Cars: Flying cars feature into the story, but they required a human driver.  Anderton has to ask his wife to take the wheel at one point as he has to deal with something else.

Sometimes it's alright to acknowledge that an adaptation of a work has added to it.

I wrote an OS X app to do this sort of thing a few years ago. At the time, I just used MAC addresses of routers to determine location. I wish I could write it for the iPhone, but it's above and beyond what's allowed by the rules.

The holy grail for a laptop was switching your SMTP settings, since a lot of people use different ISPs at work and at home. That problem goes away with a phone, but ringer volume seems like a similar level issue for phones. I could also see doing things like reducing your notifications or changing your lock settings.

(If you're interested in my software, you can find it at http://codehackers.net/locations/)

Some features of HN are karma limited. You need to have several hundred points to down vote.

Getting into college doesn't limit you. Apply to some places you'd like to work anyway. There's no cost associated with seeing if startups you'd like to work for show any interest in you. That college admission will still be there if they show no interest.

Send some emails. There's no point in us telling you to go and try for a startup if nobody is willing to hire you.

I don't say this to be harsh.

When I was going into first year University, I was working for a startup doing tech support and I was pretty sure that I was amazing.

I wouldn't hire the kid I was when I started in University. He was smart, ambitious, and knew a few things, but he didn't understand business and he didn't understand that there's a whole lot of programming that goes beyond SQL statements.

During University I started my own business and learned a lot both in and out of classes. I'm graduating in a couple of weeks, and I've got a good business ready for me to focus on it.

The time I spent at school has helped me enormously, but only because I've been working as hard as I can to make the time worthwhile.

Startups are hard, you have to be a good to great programmer to participate, and sometimes the ambition isn't enough without experience to back it up.

Have you contacted any startups about jobs? If nobody shows any interests in your level of experience, then you don't have a dilemma, just go to school

[Edit]

This isn't to say that if you don't have an offer firmly in hand, go to school, but if nobody has even said 'gosh, we wish we had the money to hire you', then you might be much better off going to school and working on some impressive side projects.

Could you elaborate on what's wrong with the CEGEP system? If you're planning on going to University, it doesn't add any additional time to the end of your degree (since you don't do grade 12 and you only do a 3 year degree if you've done CEGEP), and it seems like it makes education more accessible.

I wonder if they considered how to isolate the test variables. They seem to be testing if a Ouija board works, and if life is better than death.

The idea of kids using their cellphones in class brought an article that Frasier Speirs wrote back in October to mind: http://speirs.org/blog/2010/10/9/run-what-ya-brung.html

He argues that there are a number of assumptions that come into play with using pupil's phones in this manner. He's worth reading, since he's involved in a project bringing tablet computers (currently iPads) into the school that he's working for and integrating them into their teaching. The entire series is fascinating reading if you're interested in mobile technology in schools.

Upvoted back to one point. Whether it's right or wrong, someone downvoted it because they disagreed with the premise.

HN used to be full of stubborn individualists arguing amongst themselves with excellent writing, interesting experience, and data. In the last year or so, it just feels like everyone is trying to avoid saying anything outside our little bubble.

When I used to debate, we talked about how it wasn't if the judge agreed with you that won you the debate. It was how persuasive you were and how well you said your piece. This comment made a point and it made it well. Don't try to vote it away just because you disagree with the point.

They likely take lunch.

My concern with overlay scrollbars is that they don't seem to offer a clear affordance until the user has already taken steps to interact with them. The nub that fades in has the same feel to it as those flash websites that require you to mouse over all the graphics, just to see which ones will perform an action.

Existing scrollbars look like something in a track that you can move back and forth. Overlay scrollbars, particularly in iOS, aren't used to interact with the content. You move the content itself, the scrollbars are just indicators showing your position. They shouldn't look 'grab-able', because you never grab one.

The implementation shown in this post is grab-able, but doesn't look to be. I think that's a mistake.

(I should note, iOS is the only place I have experience with overlay scrollbars. I'm not qualified to discuss how they're used elsewhere. If other systems use them differently, please chime in.)

An awful lot of systems are still setup to use carbon copies as the method for generating the 'official' copy of a document. If you want to print onto a form that uses carbon paper, you have to use an impact printer.

A market need still exists, it's unsurprising that someone is filling that need.

Can we just get back to reading and discussing articles. I don't know if HN has jumped the shark or not, but I firmly believe that these days where we do too much navel gazing helps drag down the quality.

Also, I noticed that the account that posted this is less than a hundred says old. The guidelines state:

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

I think this falls under that category.

It's likely those folks weren't into cannibalism either before it was required to survive.

He's getting credit. Some masters programs (like Engineering) require certain undergrad prerequisite classes before he can do the actual masters. OCW won't work because he needs these classes on his transcript.

I have one free app. It's a loss leader for another app. I know that the popular wisdom is that if you want to get your name out you should blog a lot, but my specialty is creating software, and it gets my name out to my potential customers extremely well.

Do you honestly believe they were sitting there thinking "Hmm, well, I could buy a family rice for several days, or I could register this amusing but ultimately useless domain name..."?

Don't bring false dichotomies into arguments. They discredit you and make the argument less interesting.

[Edit: spelling]