calvin

In many cases they are banned from the stores where they shoplifted -- both by the company explicitly, and sometimes restraining orders are filed with the local municipality.

The higher the rating, the more of a douchebag they are. Plus, from what I know about the project it's not something they're trying to make money on -- they're having fun.

There's an article about the creators on Seattle 2.0 - http://www.seattle20.com/blog/Startup-Profile-TweetSum.aspx

Small print on the image says, "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By..."

I love it.

Yes, definitely. Hacker News is worth more than $5/year to me with the amount of time I spend on it and it'd be worth it if it keeps users more reasonable.

Why would somebody give away 5% of a company when they can pay ~$175 at a site like 99designs for a design?

Granted, you get what you pay for, but 5% is a massive overpayment even for "sweat equity."

Ask friends. If you don't have friends in the local tech community, find out what tech groups there are in your area and visit them. I don't know about New York, but in Seattle there are dozens focused on every aspect of technology you can imagine (Mac programming, Perl, PHP, security, blogging, computer networking, business networking, et cetera).

I moved to Seattle two years ago and knew virtually nobody. I met a lot of people through local groups like SaturdayHouse, Six Hour Startup, and nPost, got to know people, and even found a job through a friend of a friend.

It can be difficult and take time to find the kind of employment that pays and allows you the freedom to do what you love, but it is possible. I wish you much luck.

If you use Prototype, you'll want to look at the API docs for document.viewport and getHeight

-- http://www.prototypejs.org/api/document/viewport

-- http://www.prototypejs.org/api/element/getheight

Finish a project. It's easy to start a hundred projects, but hard to finish one.

I picked a good day to start using Git and Github. Literally just signed up today.

TortoiseSVN has always treated me well and getting similar functionality with git repositories will be fantastic.

Having hordes of actual cash won't protect you from inflation if it starts to become a problem. There's a reason gold is trading incredibly high right now.

Colorado School of Mines is in Golden, CO. It's about a 45 minute drive from Boulder.

If you've got family there are many cities within about a 30 minute commute of Boulder that are much more affordable (larger house/more land for same price). This would include towns such as Longmont, Firestone, and Erie. Some towns in the area border on being rural, but have become less so over the last fifteen years.

I grew up in Longmont and worked in Boulder for a couple years after college. Great area to live and work. I've since moved to Seattle, but I enjoy every trip home to see friends and family in the area.

I became an expert at queuing theory during a summer of employment at McDonald's.

Here's IntenseDebate's blog post about it: http://www.intensedebate.com/blog/2008/09/23/automattic-acqu...

A quote from their post for anyone worried that it'll be WordPress exclusive: "You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come!"

"Complete Fabrication."

  I contacted Valve pr man Doug Lombardi who replied to my request for comment on this news with just two words: "complete fabrication."

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/09/17/valve-on-rumors-of...

The difficulty comes in having to browse through the hundred popular tags to find one specific language tag where you want to ask a question or provide help to people.

Granted, it's not that hard to do, but it's not optimal from a usability perspective.

For instance, PHP wasn't listed in the popular tags even though it's one of the top ten most popular programming languages (http://www.langpop.com/). To find this tag, I had to click Tags, search for PHP, and click PHP.

Somehow tags don't seem to be the best way to organize this type of question asking and information gathering. They're certainly helpful for searching and gathering semantic data, but I'd find it much more useful to see the site have "sections" for different programming languages a la C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.

At least this one. I've been trialing it and am planning to sign up at the end of the trial. The service works well.

The TechCrunch40 list is here: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2007/

... just in case you forgot the names.

In regards to a video app demo, I'd recommend giving it a chance if you've got time for it. People have different learning styles and some will have an easier time learning to use this app if they "see" it first. This will become more important when you reach further beyond the early adopter crowd.

Time is part of the investment.

Wordpress makes sense for the same reasons (good) frameworks make sense: somebody's already written the code to provide blogging/publishing functionality, and they're experts at it. Plus, it is extensible w/ plugins and has numerous options for themes.

If the site needs something that's not part of the Wordpress core and there's no plugin, write some PHP and make it.

Granted, it's not quite as hardcore and writing a custom app, but why reinvent the wheel?

"Still, with many such sites nowadays, they're just providing search results, not much different than Google..."

Veoh, YouTube, and "such sites" host the videos and aren't search engines. Since the videos in violation would be hosted on their servers rather than merely linked to, they have much different requirements under the DMCA and copyright law than Google.

JungleDisk (for backup via S3), hosting (Dreamhost for shared, Slicehost for more power), Amazon MP3 for music. I've been trialing Pingdom for site monitoring and will probably sign up once trial is over. Netflix.

Last I checked, you're free to _not_ buy Vista. Buy a Mac. Buy a pre-installed Linux box. Buy your roommate's cousins used Pentium 4 w/o an OS and have your way with it.

The long tail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail).

Trying to upgrade from Vista to Vista SP1 is what drove me back to XP. I wanted to do a fresh reinstall w/ Vista SP1 and the installer told me "We're sorry, you can't install to that drive because Vista is already installed."

It had other foibles as well and managed to crash due to driver conflicts and other issues. All in all, I much more satisfied being back on XP even though I'm missing out on some of Vista's new eye candy.

Fine on FireFox 2.0.0.16/WinXP. Which Firefox are you using? If you're on 3.0 make sure you upgrade to 3.01 as it's a lot more stable.

This is why I take a Nalgene bottle everywhere with me. 32oz of pure, unadulterated h2o (depending on the quality of the local water source).

  Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet’s version of
  hypertext held a few important advantages over today’s Web.
  For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas 
  links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between 
  documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, 
  for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or 
  disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking 
  in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Otlet had some fascinating ideas that even now could change the way information is stored and effect how relationships between data are analyzed.

Another interesting thought: how do we find the modern geniuses like Otlet and learn from them now rather than waiting until they're gone?