blatherard

I read it as mostly being a very short, somewhat poignant, way of saying that life has taken him pretty far from being a sixteen year old kid writing games, but that putting out this game will help him reclaim something that he feels he's lost or is at least at risk of losing.

And that is something that at least some people will feel a connection with, maybe especially people who would care about "Jetpack" in the first place. The kind of people who were once carefree 16 year old video game players, who are probably the kind of people who he expects to be attracted to his Kickstarter campaign.

Did you notice that the guy in the background is missing his sleeves? I think the photog had a "clever" idea.

I work with David and he is totally awesome. He's giving a talk at the NYC.rb meetup on June 12 called "The Well-Grounded Nuby" which is an intro tour to Ruby. Here's the meetup link. http://www.meetup.com/NYC-rb/events/57344932/

One thing that confused me was the "Team" link at the top. Having it placed between "Philosophy" and "Contact" made me expect that it was going to be a page about the people that made the site, not a signup page about a future featureset.

Anyway, you might want to make the "team" thing stand out in a different way, if you're hoping to capture people interested in group features.

I'd recommend looking at "Learn Python the Hard Way" (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/) for an awesome example of a tutorial written with teaching beginners in mind, rather than the typical uncomfortable combination of teaching and documenting that happens in most tutorial books.

I'd be inclined to give the author the benefit of the doubt, and take serious the problem she's chosen to flag. She's saying that the attitude of "lighten up" is a problem in and of itself. To say that the "meat of the problem" is something else is really kind of like saying "lighten up."

Reporting it to github wouldn't have demonstrated the problem he was trying to flag. His problem wasn't "gitub is insecure" but instead "rails by default is insecure." When told by the rails team that fixing this problem was the responsibility of rails users, he demonstrated that even the most sophisticated users (presumably, github devs) were exposed.

If he had submitted a bug report to github, they would have probably just fixed it. And the problem he was flagging in rails wouldn't have been any closer to fixed.

I had the reverse reaction to the idea. There are few things I'd rather touch less than someone else's smartphone. I mean, these things seldom get cleaned, are often used on the toilet, and can host viruses and bacteria for long periods of time.

I'm not, but I sent the author of the comment (codacorolla on Metafilter) a message through that site to take a look over here, and also mentioned that there were some appreciations.

The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy (Dave Madden)

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty (David Kadavy)

I've read variants of the point that the protesters are "rich" by a global standard. It's an interesting observation, but I don't see how it should change the protesters actions or positions or mine as a mostly-supporter.

I'd compare this to the civil rights movement. There were plenty of privileged whites who protested segregation in the US. You could have then reasonably argued that they were privileged because the US systematically enslaved and then repressed blacks. And I would say to this, "So what?" They were protesting something they saw as a problem, on the basis of their shared humanity.

I've recently found LinkedIn quite valuable as a tool for doing Customer Development. There's a wide range of people on it, not just techies and designers, many of whom (I've found) are pretty open to helping someone out who isn't trying to recruit or hard-sell them.

According to a commenter on the linked page, you can file an impersonation report and will likely get it resolved.

Rather than say avoiding customer feedback altogether, I'd say to use it appropriately.

Whether you're using "Lean Startup" or traditional product development, you're going to encounter people who say "I want feature X". Rather than simply taking this as a request for a feature, you should act as if they said "I am trying to do something with your software, but I can't, and I think that if I had feature X I could do it."

Figuring out what that something that the customer is trying to do is invaluable. Then you need to figure out if you're going to help them do that something or not, and how to do it.

tldr: Find a role model and emulate.

Not much to see here.

The site BTjunkie was ordered blocked in Italy. In response, the owner of BTjunkie set up a proxy service, proxyitalia. The court then ordered this also blocked.

In other words, guy thumbs his nose at court, court strikes back.

I'd bet that the seasonality is due to the typical academic year. The searches slow down over the summer, plus drop off during the winter recess.

You should also account for scale.

The City of New York employs about a quarter of a million people, which is around the same size as General Electric or GM, worldwide, performing a wide range of job functions.

Also: the particular system under development included hand scanners, so you should include developing for that.

Jer Thorp is the guy who built the visualization tool. He also designed a tool to help layout the names on the 9/11 memorial.

He's got other interesting stuff at his blog, http://blog.blprnt.com/

Oh yeah, I totally grok that. If you shop at their storefront location, you can see that they are staffed almost entirely by Hasidim. I was just pointing out an instance of a US-based e-commerce website that also closes for the sabbath.

I know of at least one site in the US that does the same. B&H, a venerable camera & electronics store in NYC, shuts down their shopping site every Saturday (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/).

This article paints the worst possible picture. I took a look at the actual data on the NAEP website for the questions about Brown vs. Board of Education, which the article claims only 2% of students understand. In fact, a majority of students were able to answer basic questions about the case.

You can see the detailed question results at http://www.scribd.com/doc/58246319/Brown

The summary is:

82% of test-takers correctly answered the "easy" multiple-choice question (identify the case from a quote) about Brown. 51% correctly answered the "medium" multiple-choice question (identify the case that Brown overturned).

The "hard" question was an essay question that asked "describe the conditions that this 1954 decision was designed to correct." The results broke out as:

47% Inappropriate 26% Partial 2% Complete 23% Omitted 3% Off task

That 2% Complete is the number the article quotes. Which I would describe as "2% of students had enough time, writing ability, and understanding of Brown v. Board of Education to complete a short-answer essay question under time constraints and to the full satisfaction of the scorer."

Here's the National Assessment of Educational Progess, "The Nation's Report Card: U.S. History 2010" which is the basis for the article.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.a...

Nice tool.

Email is getting to be the command-line of the web. When I use tools like nudgemail, posterous, gmail filters or even send in receipts to expensify, I feel like I'm really in control of what's going on, in terms of time management and attention control.

Consumerist isn't a Gawker property anymore. They are now owned by Consumers Union, who also publishes Consumer Reports.

The site seems to be down. Here's a copy of the text.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=VXVx02Fy

I went to a state-related school, so maintaining a high GPA was pretty easy. I don't think my grades ended up mattering much to anybody other than me after college, but at the time they helped. I was able to take advantage of some opportunities during my undergraduate years that required good grades. I got a fellowship to do undergraduate research, and a two-year full scholarship from the math department in my last couple of years. At the least, I saved a fair amount of money.

So, judging from my experience, I'd advise you to keep an eye on the current financial effects of your grades. Otherwise, I wouldn't sweat it. Unless you're planning on staying in academia, or applying to grad schools.

I do have one additional piece of advice, which you can feel free to take or not take. It makes sense for a high schooler to resent testing, since you are forced to attend. It doesn't make sense for college student, because you're there of your own free will. Saying "I hate being 'tested' like a lab rat" indicates that you're not approaching college as the voluntary experience and opportunity it is. Losing that residual resentment might help you with some of your motivation and performance issues.

My company advertises on Stack Overflow and have had very interesting results. We get very low volume, something on the order of 1 to 3 responses per posting. However, the quality of these applicants is very high, which is great because we are not looking for commodity programmers.

I think SO Careers is currently a sort of high-end site for programming jobs, and Monster is a meat market.

I think the word he meant to use was "xenophobe"

I used to live a few blocks away from this place. They sell and service bikes and sell related gear. They're a fairly run-of-the-mill higher-end bike shop.