ankhmoop

I tend to agree with sho, and alternative, reasoned viewpoints would be enlightening.

http://blog.freenode.net/2009/06/new-freenode-webchat-and-wh...

I agree, but IRC is different and arguably antiquated technology. It doesn't require registration, operates in real-time, has no concept of reputation or community moderation. It's difficult to manage, and services that accidentally facilitate abuse make it more so.

The quality of user was exceptionally low, and "easy webchat" simply doesn't seem like a strong value proposition for the technical users that frequent the network.

Your $5.99 isn't enough to support developing anything but a cheap, top-50 hit of an application. Thanks to remarkably steep price competition and remarkably poor discoverability, the app store very much lacks anything resembling a long tail.

We sold a small app for $1.99, just to compete with similar apps in the space. If we'd sold our app for $5.99, we would have made a tidy profit on solid initial sales and moved on to make another application. However, at the $5.99 range we're competing with much more polished and comprehensive applications. This left us barely covering our development costs at the $1.99 price, with our sales rapidly declining after the first month.

I've met our payroll for months on iPhone contract work and licensing, but not one of our clients or customers has made back their initial investment. I hear the same from other iPhone developers.

Moreover, we've found Apple to be capricious in their regular and seemingly inescapable rejections, absolutely impossible to contact directly for any reason, and in the worst cases, only responsive to bad press.

Personally, I wouldn't write another in-house iPhone application for love or money, but I'm happy to capitalize on the gold rush while I focus on other platforms.

Just kidding. Mostly. If you browse to http://help.benm.at/ from your iPhone (UA checking), you can download a carrier profile that will enable tethering. Reboot your phone and you should be good to go.

I recommend downloading the carrier file manually and verifying its contents before applying the setting changes.

There's nothing wrong with being self-assured in what you do know, and honest about what you don't, but cockiness does seems to be a good indicator of an individual's ignorance of his (or her) own ignorance.

Nice story Chron. Do a story like this every day and you'll have peple [sic] lining up to buy your newspaper too.

Newspapers have the power to serve the local interest, if they would just accept the responsibility and effort necessary to do so.

I've found the dpkg method to be very effective. You can sign the packages, mirror the repositories, and set up servers to automatically upgrade some/all of the packages via cron jobs.

Packages can be automatically generated by your continual integration system, which also has the nice effect of creating a fully-trusted and centralized deployment path, making it difficult to sneak in uncommitted changes and non-managed files, etc.

The packages themselves support complex dependencies, start/stop scripts, etc, and dpkg/apt-get themselves have been ported to non-Linux platforms.

Personally, I'd still like a more comprehensive centrally managed solution based around the packaging model (ie, each server runs a management agent that can install/remove/update packages, etc).

Not using web services has less to do with being bridled corporate restrictions and more to do with preferring to use our nice, fully automated infrastructure. Hosting another small java servlet isn't going to make us break a sweat -- it'll be less work than trying to maintain user accounts and access controls across another web service.

For this reason, we solely use products that drop right into our standing infrastructure. I don't think we're too unusual in this, although we may be amongst the HN sample set.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/833-years-of-irrelevance

By all means, write a good cover letter -- but be aware that apparently unlike 37signals, some hiring managers do actually skim resumes when making the first cut. I'd feel irresponsible not doing so.

"Write a good cover letter", however, is not particularly novel or link-bait worthy advice.

When I'm hiring, I only look to the cover letter to determine whether the candidate is personally interested in the job, not whether they're qualified for it.

Might I suggest a new title: "If you want to work at 37signals, forget the resume, kill on the cover letter."

- You generally own the license to the installed software in perpetuity. Your application source art will always be readable.

- It will integrate better with your desktop user experience. Printing, drag-and-drop, copy/paste of complex data, input devices (wacom tablets), etc.