aed

Wow, this is exactly the same problem I have. I have an extremely broad skill set and often wonder how to market myself to give myself the most opportunities.

Relevant patio11: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

I'd love to seem some kind of standardization around this. Perhaps the "persons" table doesn't have the name but rather the name is stored on a "names" table with an EAV model allowing for all kinds of conventions.

Yes, it's been a while but I tried that initially. I forget why I didn't like it... maybe I'll give it another shot.

I NEED THIS FOR EXCEL!

There's been a few discussions about Excel on HN recently and it's such a major tool in so many organizations and keeping track of changes is a nightmare.

Here's a classic example:

- Budgeting model for company with ~10 employees and 8 departments. Model has 30 or so sheets. Tracks all assumptions on the revenue and expense sides. Great model, built well, works excellently.

- CFO goes in and changes the conversion assumptions for the year.

- I go into the model after the CFO, notice that net income increased by $500,000 since the last time I looked at it. WHAT THE HELL CHANGED?

Now take this example and imagine you're on a late night call with the CEO, CFO, and CMO. Ideas and thoughts are going back and forth. "Hey, what does it do to revenue if we change assumption A from X to Y?" ... "OK, I like that. What about changing assumption B from W to Z?" ... "Nah, let's not do that."

At the end of the call I have our updated model that everyone is happy with... but I have no way to easily and reliably see exactly what was changed.

The only thing I currently do is setup a reconciliation sheets on the income statement. For each version of the model, I create a new sheet and copy/paste values from the income sheet then I can do a diff and see what numbers changed. This works well, but there's got to be a better way.

PLEASE FIX THIS.

Take a look at ToDoMVC: http://todomvc.com/

"TodoMVC [is] a project which offers the same Todo application implemented using MV* concepts in most of the popular JavaScript MV* frameworks of today."

This is great. Beyond side projects, I'd love to see some "behind the side project"-type stuff. Your post here is a perfect example.

I'm really starting to wonder if we're in a "developer bubble."

Everyone wants to learn to code. Every other week there's a blog post on "why everyone should learn to code." Last year, NYC Mayor Bloomberg posted his new years resolution was to learn to code[0]. Soaring enrollments is just another sign.

[0] https://twitter.com/Codecademy/status/155038379216609280

Kind of funny considering that the whole point of Lorem Ipsum was to get rid of the distraction of actual content in the first place.

I actually know exactly what you're talking about and here's what I do:

- Put Bootstrap in a folder and import it as a framework in CodeKit. (Just like you.)

- In my project folder, I create a LESS file for the project (e.g. project.less).

- At the very top of my project.less I add an import for bootstrap (@import "bootstrap.less")

- I define and customize all my LESS variables within the project.less without touching bootstrap.less.

Yes, this does mean that the variables are being define again. However, this won't matter because what you define in your project.less will override everything else.

So this is kind of odd... Nothing loaded when I first opened the page. I opened developer tools and had a javascript error "Failed to load resource http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js . Well, I keep all facebook widgets blocked with Ghostery and disabling it allowed the website to load.

Seems kind of strange. I mean if FB goes down or moves the location of that js file or something, the whole jamwithchrome site won't work?

Here is exactly what you're looking for: http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-git

I'm really interested in learning more about how use use FreeMind. I've been using a collection of text documents as "cheatsheets" that I can refer to, but it's less than perfect.

Maybe I'm dumb, but I can't tell if this is a joke or not. These blurry, zoomed-in photos look like they could be anything. This is either really lame or proof that I'm an idiot.

Colin - this is awesome and I just recently began working on an idea based on many of the same observations you've made. Just shot you an email to the contact@ address!

New Orleans:

- Emerging startup scene and growing ecosystem for nurturing startups

- Established companies bringing big offices here: -- GameLoft, 8 jobs open, more to come (http://www.jobsinnola.com/New/index.htm) -- GE Capital, 35 jobs open, hiring 300 by 2015 (http://jobs.gecareers.com/go/GE-Capital-Jobs/236076/?filter=...)

- Excellent cost of living, excellent culture, excellent food, laid back atmosphere

Before dumping the money on a geek desk, you really ought to try a hacked-together solution for a week or so. There's the $20 IKEA hack option or you can just stick a chair or a box on your desk.

You may end up finding your prefer a specific configuration and look at other standing desk options.

Also, in terms of sittings vs. standing and sore feet. I've been OK with comfortable shoes, but I'm close to getting a standing mat. There are some pretty pricey ones on Amazon, but Uline sells standing mats for $30 that are probably comparable to the expensive ones.

Gmail's handling of multiple accounts is just about the poorest I've seen in any email client. Even Microsoft Outlook handles multiple accounts better!

I recently read The Pragmatic Programmers book SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming (http://pragprog.com/book/bksqla/sql-antipatterns) and chapter 6 talks specifically about this kind of DB design (entity-attribute-value) and the benefits/pitfalls. It's a great read and I highly recommend it.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal and I'm a major skeptic of all things, but I'm amazed at hour accurate Leaky was for me.

My wife and I pay $119 per month for car insurance and Leaky's magic was within $3 bucks. Wow.

EDIT: Might I suggested some kind of accuracy checking feature? For example, my Leaky estimate vs. actual was really close and it would be cool if you collected data on this. Like if I selected "I use company X and my rate is $Y", then you could compare accuracy.

I'd love to see you do write-ups on some of the 35+ cool companies you met with. Surely you've seen some neat things. Even if the companies/positions weren't for you, I'm sure they'd benefit from the exposure as would all of us.

Despite the restrictions, I actually thought this would be cool. Maybe I can cook something up something useful for myself and my friends?

However... NO SCORE DATA in the free API?! That's the only useful information. Just limit free API usage so I can at least toy with it without having to completely sell my soul.

So basically, all I can do through the public API is pull news headlines. Without paying ESPN, all I can build is a free app (no ads either!) and use it to add headlines to direct traffic to your site. There is no incentive for any developer to use this.

Here's a hint ESPN: you already have free "Headlines API." They're called RSS feeds.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?page=rssinfo

There, every headline you could want from ESPN.

Oh, you want something more specific? Here, I just created my own feed for LSU Baseball: http://search.espn.go.com/rss/lsu-baseball/

One of the more interesting chapters in the Steve Jobs book discusses the time when Jobs finally convinced the recording industry that piracy wasn't necessarily a problem because people want free stuff (though that is a portion of it) but that it was simply easier than the alternatives. (In the case of the music industry at the time, every label had their own solution and they were all a pain to use.)

This experiment (and other humorous examples like this: http://datenform.de/blog/dead-drops-preview) displays the complexity of trying to prevent piracy by fighting it. If a critical mass of people want something and there isn't a convenient way to get it, alternatives will arise.

Life... er... pirates will always find a way.

This seems like it would be a good pastime for kids. Teaches patience, trial-and-error, engineering, creativity, etc.

The Receivables Exchange, a New Orleans based startup, is hiring interns all sorts of interns.

Go the bottom of the page: http://receivablesxchange.com/about_us/careers/index.html

The internships@ address goes directly to me, so if you mention HN, I'll be sure your resume gets to the right people.

This is pretty cool. In all my time going used book sales, I've never seen anyone doing this. Maybe I just go at the wrong times.

I wonder what the economics are here. Using his setup, you can get an Axim X51 on eBay for around $100 and the scanner he uses goes for around $250 on eBay ($384 new). That's at least $350 in initial costs.

Assuming a profit of $5 per book (just a wild guess) you'd need to sell 70 books to recoup that cost. Using his ratio of 1 "buy" to every 30 "reject" books, you'd have to go through 2,100 books to recoup your initial costs!

Taking it a step further, if you could scan three books per minute (another wild guess), it would take 700 minutes, nearly 12 hours, of "hunting" to earn back you startup costs.

Based on all those numbers and assumptions, your hourly earnings are roughly $30 per hour. ($350 / 12)

Based on a standard 2,000 hours of work per year (basically, 5 days a week for 50 weeks), this comes to $30*2000 = $60,000.... awfully close to his estimate of $1,000 per week for a person working alone.

Isn't the point of the MVP that you're putting the cart before the horse on purpose? The $2,000 on design should come after you've found if there's a market for your product.

I agree on using caution with a technical audience though... perhaps using a cheapy $30 template with a little customization so you don't have to have an attribution link and it doesn't look like everything else?

I agree. Probably 50% or so of the time I'm looking for something I've looked at before... either in my history or my "archive" that is spread across multiple sites.

Excellent, this was much needed. I'll be sure to provide feedback as I play with it.