536 karma · joined May 17, 2010
I'm an anonymous coward.
Email: uefvrdauhk@snkmail.com
6a9af95c90e041d534b625d0c2de4924
• 24-bit audio is magical. When I recorded myself playing guitar in 24-bit and played it back through my amp, it sounded like I was still playing. 16-bit sounded like a CD.
• With MP3s, 192 kbps is a huge step up from 128 kbps. 192 doesn't exhibit any of the "swooshiness" heard in the upper range of 128 kbps MP3s for regular rock/pop/hiphop music.
• Google's results are much better. A handful of times I searched for something I would think, "Wait, that can't be all there is," and Google would give me back what I was looking for above the fold.
• Google is much, much faster in returning results for my regular searches, which are usually programming related or an esoteric Wikipedia topic.
• DuckDuckGo's bang syntax (!jquery, etc) isn't any better than search keywords built into Firefox and Chrome.
• DuckDuckGo's settings page is like Skyrim -- epic and freeform.
• DuckDuckGo is a very well-executed product. The UI is clean, browser integration is smart ("You're using Chrome! Click this!" or something), and it's tailored for my savvy search users.
Guess I'm not awesome. I'll just continue to live in the south bay under a rock.
Pretty out there. Specifically, Flegr describes the changes to his personality:
> For example, he says, he thought nothing of crossing the street in the middle of dense traffic, “and if cars honked at me, I didn’t jump out of the way.” He also made no effort to hide his scorn for the Communists who ruled Czechoslovakia for most of his early adulthood. “It was very risky to openly speak your mind at that time,” he says. “I was lucky I wasn’t imprisoned.” And during a research stint in eastern Turkey, when the strife-torn region frequently erupted in gunfire, he recalls being “very calm.” In contrast, he says, “my colleagues were terrified. I wondered what was wrong with myself.”
FWIW, if you're working with a lot of CSS and JavaScript resources, check out webassets (https://github.com/miracle2k/webassets) for building asset bundles.
Because we're lazy.
you give away control over your personal data
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that.
you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction
A lot more than my email is within that jurisdiction and is much more important -- like my money, family, and possessions.
Besides, I'm a hacker. If I want to send something sensitive, I'll be smarter than sending it over SMTP and logging it via Gmail.
you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom, but also the full content of that communication
Yep, they data-mine my email anonymously, but they try to not be evil about it. There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too. Besides, the group effort cuts down spam.
Five years ago, however, I learned Python for a job and never looked back. In terms of programming languages they're practically the same thing. But Python is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to hire for. And stuff like this (dereferencing, "array context," worrying about how to create my objects) makes me sigh.
Perl, I love you, but I'm not looking back.
(apologies for the language flame war bait)
Let's look at GitHub:
* Most of GitHub's 50 or so employees are engineers[1], not sales or marketing or product management or art directors or logistics or accounting.
* GitHub's primary product is github.com[2], a product which is primarily used by engineers.
* The company hasn't taken funding outside of friends & family[3].
* They claim to be "very profitable"[4].
* Their team is distributed[1], which can work well for engineers who enjoy time alone.
Compare this to my startup: Engineers are < 33% of the company, we're all in one location, we have a range of web and mobile products, and we've taken funding from VCs.
Our customers are normal humans, not engineers (no offense, I'm one too), and our products need to be sold and marketed so that people understand why they're good. We don't have the benefit of a customer base who intrinsically know why the product is great once they use it like engineers do. Our products want to make our customers come work for us.
We're all in one place because we need to collaborate with non-engineers to build our product. Good in-person relationships with the sales and marketing people lets us work together very well and is important for non-engineers, who especially can't use a DVCS to collaborate.
We iterate quickly, so systems like Campfire or wikis are useless. There's no point in writing documentation and employee on-boarding instructions if they're going to be out of date in two weeks or if it's easier to walk over to The Guy Who Knows That Stuff and ask. Yes, our bus factor is horribly low, but it's not worth documenting a system that will change wildly in two months.
We also have a board of directors who are demanding. We have monthly and quarterly goals we need to meet. We don't have time to work on cool things like bots and music players because we're busy experimenting and building products which we're still defining. Sure, we add a few easter eggs here and there, but I need to finish the damn CRM improvements, otherwise the sales team can't handle our customers in the way we want, the customers won't have the best experience, we won't hit our January numbers, and the board will be angry.
I love GitHub. It's one of the greatest things to happen to open source and software project collaboration. But whenever Zach Holman shows off a well-manicured presentation or blog post about how awesome GitHub's ideals and work environment are, I have to roll my eyes a little. His intentions are good and he's a swell writer and presenter, but I can't help but wonder what kind of magical, mystical fairyland he think's he in.
(No offense, Zach. I think you're great. Let's get a beer.)
[1] https://github.com/humans.txt
[2] Probably. What else do they do?
[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454597
[4] http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/github-one-million/This presentation is pretty good and has some good tenets. However, I have trouble believing that all of these ideals will work when you have a PM screaming at your engineers to finish the internal CRM system, or something else that engineers must work on but don't necessarily care about.
Construct 2 looks like a great framework. There's a little background in this interview: http://www.html5grind.com/2011/07/12/construct-2-create-html...
Since you mentioned paying "a few dollars" to Namecheap, can you comment on the feasibility of their $8.95 "PositiveSSL" certificate? ( http://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/comodo.aspx )
After completing a course you correctly associated new knowledge with the potential for a cool project in an area which has been made very attractive ("hot") following Google's announcement of self-driving vehicles. You then wrote up the project in very nice prose with informative pictures and a great above-the-fold hook that makes me say, "Wow, I need to read more."
This project is a code sample, writing sample, presentation, and creativity example all in one, and it answers the "Should we hire this person?" question immediately. For that, I commend you.
I'm in the SF bay area and, with a cookieless Chrome incognito window, I see GoDaddy as result #1 and NameCheap as result #4 — after three sponsored results, one of which is also GoDaddy.
• The "Read Later" bookmarklet is handy and even works inside Google Reader. (You're using http://fulltextrssfeed.com/ for your feeds, right?)
• The Instapaper iOS client is amazong on iPad. Reading is nice and, if you share via email or EverNote, it queues up email if you're offline.
• ReadNow is a $5 client for Mac which looks as nice as the iOS client and has the same feature set and lots of keyboard shortcuts. The only cons are that images aren't saved for offline reading and sending links sometimes fails silently.
• EverPaper (~$5 or so) is a decent client for Android.
“Interactive software products intended to interact with a user for entertainment (action, role play, strategy, adventure, simulations, racing, sport, arcade, card and board games) and/or education, that may be published for multiple machines, platforms or media”
There is a small saving grace:
“No license fees are due if less than 5,000 copies of a particular game title are distributed”
Distribution of a particular game is not exclusive of web distribution! Take one of our most popular arcade games for example, “8 Bit Runner”. To date it’s far surpassed 5,000 plays. In their eyes this could easily qualify as 5,000 distributions. Had the author used MP3, they’d then be due to pay the MP3 licensers $2,500 for a small online game.
I had absolutely no idea that MP3 has such a license.
No programming interview process is perfect, and the small homework assignment should be accompanied by due diligence on both sides — technical interviewing by the company, background research of the company and/or founders by the candidate, etc. Interpreting a small, reasonable homework assignment as a sign that the company only hires second-rate programmers is a fast jump to a very pessimistic conclusion.
That said, one recent candidate wrote us very angrily that he was pursuing N other companies and didn't have time to do any "silly" homework assignment. He claimed that the very-domain-specific, open-source project he maintains should be enough of a coding example. I felt that was fine; if he didn't want to spent a small amount of time to complete a small request from us (and possibly show off a little) and return the favor the time _we_, a company of <10 people, were spending on _him_, it probably wasn't a good fit anyway.
I understand this sentiment, but pre-interview homework (provided that it's reasonable) is one of the best indicators of enthusiasm, attention to detail, creativity, and ballpark of coding skill. Most importantly it reveals how you will react to solving one of our problems which, if hired, is what you'll be doing most of the time.
Indeed. Requiring me to pay $35 or whatever just to have a bunch of contractors call me and haggle over the phone isn't useful.
I much prefer Redbeacon's approach: Download the iPhone app, take a few pictures, and let the providers send you concrete prices.
Next, I opened up Image -> Adjustments -> Levels and dragged the grey (middle) adjustment slider toward the left to lighten the darker areas. Dragging the white (right) slider a little left also helps to reduce the maximum blackness of the image.