capsule_toy

I have a phone number for everyone I want to snapchat with, but a couple of those people are not on Facebook. I can't imagine someone not having a smartphone in my demographic but not having FB, while rare, does happen.

Imperfect code that's done cheaper and faster could be more acceptable to your client with no moral or legal ramifications for you (ie as long as you make the client aware of the drawbacks and nothing bad like people dieing could occur). An exception would be programming in the medical fields. Other than those cases, comparing most programming to bridge building is silly.

The next difficulty is defining correct code. It's going to be difficult to find consensus beyond anything basic.

Based on what I've read in this thread and your site, it seems that at the very least, you have no idea how to construct a viable argument and defend it with the scientific and medical community. Until you realize this and solve this problem, you won't make any headway.

And depending on what your idea of success is, there are people making successful challenges. They just understand the framework they need to operate in.

There's also no control over the content. As an advertiser, I would be worried with where my ads may end up. With a traditional publication, I generally know the type of content that will come out and their policies.

For your publication, the writers will keep writing as their job, but if you upset the content generators at reddit, you'll lose your content source.

In general, monetization of a publication is a more proven model than monetization of user generated content.

I agree that it's low risk, but I don't think you can discount it completely. We have had public cases of high net worth individuals and people from prestigious companies doing immoral things (eg Kleiner Perkins, HP).

The main reason I avoid tables is because of my previous experience. Tables, and especially nested tables that wrap the entire site, would be noticeably slower when changing styles dynamically. For example, changing the positioning of an element on hover when the element is deeply nested in divs. The second I removed the tables, this was calculated much faster. This was about five years ago so I have no idea if this performance concern exists any more.

Separation of concerns is a design choice. I'm not sure what context you meant, but if you find that it's overkill, you can make that design choice that it's unnecessary. In general, I find separating these concerns leads to cleaner and more understandable code, but I can certainly imagine situations where your argument can be made, especially on sites that are simpler.

Some people do believe quite a bit in purity and believe the markup should just describe the data. I agree that it's nice but doesn't always work out in practice. This can get taken too far. For example, I've seen complex workarounds for centering vertical alignment when they could have just thrown a table, but they wouldn't do it because a table is for tabular data. In this case, I felt that the table would have been easier to read and understand. Again, this is my preference and others may disagree.

TL;DR; - It depends. And performance issues back in the day.

There is an alternative theory. Google isn't being strongarmed but they also aren't trying to improve search results. Instead they're trying to build moats around products like Youtube. By appeasing the content owners, the favor might be returned with, for example, exclusive content just for Youtube.

Note: I'm not saying this is the case.

I agree this is probably what's happening but I'm worried this might change in the future. Right now I think all that happens is that the link is removed from the search results but if the site itself is also penalized, I'm afraid content owners can now see the value of sending both a DMCA and copyright takedown notice simultaneously.

You're assuming that legitimate sites that help independent artists won't receive many copyright takedown requests. It's difficult for sites to control what their users upload and they typically rely on the DMCA. If this system is abused, new legitimate sites that respect DMCA can still be buried.

This does level the playing field for Youtube. They've been facing issues with videos that have been filtered for content falling under fair use and over-aggressive labels making mistaken takedowns. A new user-contributed video startup will now have to develop the same filtering and protections, or they risk being buried by Google through this system.

In the US at least, please stop analyzing these types of social interactions literally. The subtext is quite different. Basically, "Hi, how are you doing?" is the equivalent of "Hi, I'm being a pleasant person going through this standard cultural greeting." Expecting something more from this pattern shows a poor understanding of the culture.

Breaking out of this is easy. As other people have mentioned, simply departing from the script is effective. For example, you can follow-up "Hi, how are you doing?" with "How's your day been going?" or "It's pretty busy in here." There's also subtext here and it's basically "I'd like to engage in a conversation."

I'm not even sure how you ask a person how they're doing in a way that lets them know you mean it without sounding condescending.

Installing lockers is something that I would get into if I wasn't already involved with a company doing something very similar but not for package deliveries. Once you build out the infrastructure, you have an asset with good ROI and a moat against potential competitors. I know someone doing exactly this right now and is basically trying to expand as quickly as possible.

I actually think lockers are more convenient because I don't even have to think about the day and time. I just pick up my package when it's convenient.

I also imagine customized delivery times would increase costs and make logistics more difficult. The only place I know offhand that has customized delivery times is Tokyo, so I wonder how they manage. Probably more affordable in a high density area with couriers.

I knew arcades that hosted competitions and were really vying for the market you're talking about. Almost all of them did have music games (DDR, Beatmania), but those were incredibly popular and lucrative when they came out. When the popularity of those games died, many of these places went out of business.

Even with music games, these were places where most of the floor space was dedicated to the latest fighting games, old school shmups, etc.

There's simply very little demand in the US for the type of arcade you want.

Online gambling isn't illegal in the US, but financing it has been illegal since the SAFE Port Act[1] passed. Poker sites were still getting around the provision by hiding the source of transactions through payment processors. The recent shutdown of poker sites to US customers was actually a shutdown of these payment processors used to fund US accounts.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAFE_Port_Act#Internet_gambling...

A competition isn't necessarily the best metric b/c the competitors are going to be a biased subset of the overall student body, and may not actually represent the quality of the education. I didn't go to a great school but there were still some very brilliant people there.

My guess is it makes more sense to take products that can be monetized over as much as the user base as possible, and increase their efficacy than try to enter different verticals.

B/c of Computer Science's current popularity, it would be a huge mistake to start an education initiative and not start with Computer Science.

I actually think Reddit is quite optimized and not missing out on too many users. The Reddit homepage can take on the following states:

1) As it currently is dominated by memes and linkbait articles 2) Links to actual news and good content 3) A combination of 1 and 2

Out of the 3, my guess is #1 drives the most traffic. If you're goal is to get the most traffic, then almost by definition you're trying to get popular content as the default state.

I've seen people sucked into tv dramas, tv dramas are evil.

I've seen people sucked into WoW, WoW is evil.

I've seen people sucked into Final Fantasy, heck... every RPG is probably evil.

Actually, it seems like any form of entertainment can be rather addictive, the world would be better if that whole industry went away.

You're right, this is easy.

I do this a lot. A couple things I've realized: - Quite a few of the people you meet aren't going to lead to much. A few of them will lead to something but not until further down the road. Basically, not everyone is looking for freelance developers.

- You have to know a bit about sales. If I'm talking to someone non-technical looking for an online store, I'm an expert in e-commerce, but if I was talking to someone in the industry, I'm less likely to throw out the term expert and more likely to try and talk about specifics.

- This is culture dependent but in the States, I've found being too modest is a negative and people seem to interpret it as either disinterest, lack of confidence, or lack of skills.

- I once overheard a discussion that went something like this, "I'm looking for a developer." "If you can get <that person> that would be great." I'm not there yet but I want to be <that person>.

A lot of the people I work for need someone to be able to make sites and maintain them, but they don't have enough work to justify paying someone fulltime. Most of my employers just come to me when they need work done. Luckily, they always seem to want and need extra customizations on a somewhat consistent basis.

Red light cameras can actually increase accidents at intersections. Lengthening the time of a yellow light can decrease accidents.

One of the main reasons cities use red light cameras is to increase revenue. They aren't doing it to make the road safer.

I don't know if that's a fair comparison since you have a lot of experience in PHP and it sounds like, less in Ruby. It would be more fair to compare your productivity and costs in PHP against a seasoned Ruby developer.

I would much rather the phrase be something like, "don't take it too personally, we're all on the same team and even though I'm harsh, the goal is to improve your work."

I know it doesn't roll off the tongue like "it's not personal, it's just business," but the problem is most of the time when I hear that particular phrase, I'm probably about to be screwed over in some way.

I'm very surprised that it sounds like he used his Udacity course as the material for the actual Stanford course. That's a huge disservice to Stanford students.

Online education is going to take time to develop. If the courses are too difficult, very few people would make it through them. At this stage, they need the idea to catch on more than anything else. Once it catches on and they can establish legitimacy (i.e. being able to hand out degrees or find people jobs), then it'll be easier to convince prospective students to deal with more challenging material. It's a balancing act.

A lot of ppl have the drive, and have made sacrifices. I was temporarily homeless for a few months and slept out of the company's office. One of my friends is living rent free in an investor's living room, and I've heard of others doing this.

Don't get me wrong. The vast majority of people probably wouldn't be willing to make these kinds of sacrifices. I'm also not putting down Kurt's drive, but sacrifice is probably not a big enough limiting factor to auto get into YC.

Do you actually know what the margin is or are you just making an assumption? There are certainly posh places that use cheap ingredients and overcharge to get a high margin, but from what I understand, most places can't get away with that. Margins are actually quite low because of the competitiveness of the restaurant industry.

Happened to me. Turned out I already had an account, but forgot about it. If you try to register an account w/ an existing e-mail, it'll tell you if it's already being used. The checkout process after I was logged in went fine.

Also, I tried the password reset before realizing I had it stored in 1Pass, and the reset didn't work. Site could use some work on functionality.

I like how you assumed malice when bureaucracy is a much more plausible explanation.

I would think the written contract becomes a new agreement that supersedes the verbal one. What if there's a dispute in the terms of the written contract that was never brought up verbally?

I actually am looking for clarification b/c I would be interested in knowing if the prior verbal agreement trumps all future written discussions. It just isn't what I guess would be the case, and I can certainly see how someone would interpret being asked to sign a contract a renegotiation of terms, which is what I think happened in this case.