codinghorror

I like the way you think! This is the sort of thing one tries to get out of audition projects.

Hiring employees is not angel investing. You want to minimize risk, not maximize it. VCs and angels are in the business of assuming massive amounts of risk.

Startups and small businesses.. aren't.

I agree with this. His last interview was just embarrassingly bad, no kind of leadership at all. Leadership is taking responsibility and owning your actions, not hand waving and vaguely pushing away.

I think the reality is that only large-ish companies have the slack time necessary to devote to mentoring. Companies have to get to a certain size first.

At a startup, you are running full tilt 24/7 by necessity.

If we give you a real project to work on and you view that as "fear-based", "a hoop", and "nonsense" -- those are huge red flags.

You'd rather solve B.S. puzzle questions, or debug basic algorithms on a whiteboard standing in front of an interviewer?

I like real work. You should too. Otherwise, you are absolutely right, we shouldn't be working together.

This part is absolutely a pain. You are supposed to set up (or contract with) umbrella corporations that can handle local taxes, etc. Most reasonably large countries will have an agency willing to do this.. for a fee of course.

If you get, say, Facebook or IBM or Microsoft large then you just have lots of regional offices to handle this.

Strongly suggest setting up http://meta.ycombinator.com for the same reasons we did so on Stack Overflow. Self governance and public discussion of policies is hugely important to sustainable community.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-do...

Discourse is focused around community creation, not necessarily comments per se. That's kind of a secondary use and it is good from a dogfooding perspective.

I'll tell you this: Discourse is a zillion times better at making my admin / moderation tasks easier than the TypePad commenting tools it came from.

It's a hybrid model, but primarily flat.

As I mentioned in the article, it's like saying "please read the Wikipedia citations". You can get plenty of benefit from the main Wikipedia article itself, but it's nice when the comments are sane and contain signal, as they can help you drill down into the claims of the article and evaluate them.

It is definitely optional, comments are like annotations to the article.

Counterpoint: sometimes I skip to the HN comments before reading the linked URL to see if there are any major problems / concerns / flaws in the article. Kind of conceptually the same way people use Amazon user reviews when determining if they want to buy a product or not. Crowdsourcing credibility..

The manufacturer (writer) tells one story, the consumers (readers) may tell another. If you want the bigger picture, it is nice to consider both. But you're right that a well written article should stand on its own, the comments shouldn't be necessary to complete the article.

Is it really this hard to fend off a DDOS? At the funding and staffing level Meetup is at, I find this a little hard to understand.

doh!

Indeed, the community contributed a screenshot based walkthrough here:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/beginners-guide-to-deploy-disco...

True. Any complaints are already the tip of an iceberg you can't see.

And the people complaining should be treated like your best friends: they cared enough to complain. Nobody else cared.

Right, this is why you listen to your community, but you don't blindly do everything they tell you to do. Filtering out the best 10% of feedback -- and resisting the transformation of the car you designed into a truck because "the community demanded it" -- is the way to go.

You can't release crap, even in your first version. Not saying your friends did that, but you have to have the kernel of something decent to show people before you release. Otherwise you're blowing the launch by taking all that initial interest and squandering it.

(I'd also argue mobile apps have a severe updating problem, that web apps do not.)

Agree that one issue in the Ruby ecosystem is that installs are too hard. Can you try our Docker install, we hope to move to this soon as our standard recommended install for that very reason, would love feedback:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker

It also depends what stage you are at.

This article is about early stage products that are very new. If you're looking at a mature product that has been on the market for 10+ years, it's likely (I hope!) that most of the major obvious pain / complaint points have already been addressed. I don't think CDD would be as useful in that scenario -- you want a different model.

Yes exactly -- we weight common feedback from multiple Discourse instances much more heavily than individual opinions from folks on meta.discourse, for example.

(There is also the issue of observing what people do versus what they say they do. At least early on I find the problems are severe and obvious enough that this subtlety isn't a big deal yet.)

Yeah closed and unanswered should definitely be delisted. These kinds of questions usually have negative votes so they do have a lower score in the sitemap weight but I am not sure how much emphasis G gives that.

I will forward this on for SE to think about improving.

I assume you mean Quora, because I know at Stack Exchange we were religious about doing everything the right way.

I think Google cares more about the user experience (how bad is it if a user ends up on this page after searching) than the exact letter of the law. The truly sleazy sites usually do badly on both metrics though.

Also try http://data.stackexchange.com where you can query Stack Overflow and other SE site data in real time using SQL.

A shiny finish on a keyboard is just.. evil and wrong.

You can disable it via the dip switches, as well as a bunch of other tweaks available via same.

You can choose Dvorak, Colemak, QWERTY via dipswitches on the back. As well as Mac (Alt/Command), disable Windows Key, switch Caps Lock with Ctrl, etc.

It comes with a key puller, so you can easily swap the keys with whatever keycaps you like. WASD sells tons of different keycaps.

I love ergonomic keyboards too but for a mass market item we wanted to follow the classic standards everyone knows first and foremost. Perhaps if the base model does really well, we can come back with an ergo model.

No media keys on the Leopold either, or painted backplate, etc.

Clear is sort of like blue without the noise. It's a strong actuation force, closer to real buckling spring keyboards... but without the deafening gunshot sounds every time you press a key. :)

I do like the Ducky Shine, but this is a 100% custom design that Weyman and I came up with. It's not supposed to look radically different, but much cleaner and minimalistic. The details matter.

I love ergonomic keyboards too, but they're extremely specialized. A mass market keyboard needs to appeal to as many folks as possible, and using the "classic" standard keyboard layout is the best way to do that.

There is a tenkeyless option if that helps, and there is room at the front for a wrist rest that can be periodically replaced as it wears.

They are testing a discourse instance: http://ubuntu-discourse.org/

Since Discourse is fully open source under GPL v2 anyone can validate its security (or lack thereof) at will on GitHub. And it is not written in PHP.