colinsidoti

Have you tried reddit?

For the sake of argument, how is this different from self funding? Ramen profitable isn't profitable, and not taking seed is just preventing you from paying yourself.

I'm working on an OS with a hybrid approach: http://www.projectmeadow.com

(The site isn't as fine tuned as I'd like yet...but interested in your thoughts. Thanks!)

Happy to see you got PHP running, I imagine the next step is a Wordpress Plugin to handle it automatically.

I suspect that you'll frequently need to fallback to the socket approach. I imagine a lot of shared hosts block the capability to run exec (Godaddy, Hostgator, other common php hosts), and I believe that's where a lot of PHP lives.

Fun fact: The core of AutoSyringe and his dialysis pumps was delivering super precise dosages of medication. DEKA applied that same technology to the new Freestyle Coke machine (delivering super precise amounts of soda concentrate), in return for Coca Cola helping them distribute the Slingshot.

Out of interest, are you from NJ (or another full-service state)? I noticed this a lot in NJ but not in Massachusetts. I think it's because in MA I have to go inside to pay cash, which is a much bigger hassle than simply putting my credit card into the pump.

This is one of the more mindboggling snippets of CSS you'll ever see. It's up there with techniques that keep two columns the same height without using Javascript or a <table> element.

I've implemented this before, but still wouldn't be able to produce it on the spot without Googling. This post encouraged me to take a deeper look.

This page goes in depth on how it works, but is still a bit confusing: http://code.google.com/p/cleanstickyfooter/

The craziest part is the #wrapper element, which uses a nifty hack to support old and new browsers. Old browsers don't work with css min-height, but they do allow the height property to expand. Moreover, old browsers will ignore an "important!" tag if the same property is addressed later in that selector.

It's a perfect storm of dumb luck that "min-height: 100%; height: auto important!; height: 100%;" actually manages to do what you want, for this exact scenario, in all browsers. That line looks pretty stupid to most modern css devs.

Here's an arguably cleaner approach that I believe will work for most modern browsers (I think after IE6, but could easily be mistaken). No need for the wrapper around all content, but you still need that darn "push" div. Actually now that I think about it, it might even work for older browsers if you add "height: auto important!; height: 100%;" to the body. Maybe someone can test? http://jsfiddle.net/A3BLm/1/

position: fixed is if you actually want the footer to always be visible, with the main body content scrolling out from under it. To my knowledge, this works across all devices.

The goal of this snippet is to have the footer always below the content, but in the event the content is shorter than the page height, the footer should still be placed at the bottom of the page.

Really Javascript isn't a terrible solution here, since it only needs to be run on load and on window resize (rare events), but the CSS is indeed nifty and worth knowing it exists.

I will never understand reliance on Github for screening applicants. Here, the people that need a hacker probably have no idea what to look for in a Github account.

"You should be doing that anyway."

A huge selling point of Rails, other web frameworks, and ORMs in general, is that you don't have to be doing these checks. You can push the query through without concern of SQL injection, and handle the failure case there. This is convenient because you often have to handle that failure case anyway.

Rails' own "Getting Started" guide uses this technique because it's assumed to be secure: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#showing-a...

We know you can "break" the application by tampering with IDs, but you shouldn't be able to pose a security threat.

Validating type and data ranges is common with things like dropdowns, where you need to ensure an actual option was selected. This is a very common security flaw, and it's definitely good practice to be checking (especially when it leads to adding/updating database rows).

I find it interesting that this was in the same class as Filepicker.io

Is cloud-based file selection something that should be offered by a web developer, or by the OS?

His reach is right up there with Fred Wilson IMO. He's a well respected guy in the entrepreneur/investment community. He also always answers his wife's phone calls, even in the middle of talks.

It'll be interesting to see how the mindshare arrangement plays out.

VC's are used to writing huge checks and providing value after a company has solved product-market fit. This asks them to write a tiny check and provide very early expertise they generally don't provide.

Less than two weeks ago, this scathing comment showed up on HN about BalancedPayments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744982

Did Balanced ever respond? The comments here about the founders are quite opposite.

Hmm, still seems kinda messy to rely on CSS.

Next thought, maybe you can override Google's open method with something like this: http://jsfiddle.net/Z3Ysq/

They may have been able to prevent this with a closure, but I think you could workaround everything. Watch out for scope issues, but I think there's a way to make this completely generalizable.

That being said, I agree that at some point, it might get too messy figuring this all out that your existing solution is best. Kudos for the clever concept.

I'm not very familiar with Chrome development, but it seems like you have pretty strong capabilities. Why couldn't bind to the click event on the Compose button?

Argh.

PHPFog was my goto place for self-hosting Wordpress blogs, is AppFog as simple?

It's own company: http://www.tnooz.com/2012/11/08/news/priceline-buys-kayak-fo...

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if we see another OTA scoop up Hipmunk soon while it's (relatively) cheap.

In recent times, Kayak has been shifting to push customers directly to airlines and hotels, instead of pushing them through online travel agencies like Priceline.

I suspect this is Priceline admitting that it (and other OTAs) are losing relevance in preference for the meta-search model.

Smart move, and I don't think they're dumb enough to ruin it. Read up on how successful Priceline was with their Booking.com acquisition.

I've quoted it before as well, not at all surprised to see it again. You should buy and read the book.

Unlike most times people tell you to read a book, it'll actually only take 10 minutes.

Well, the private aspects of the network. Can't SSH in and certs no longer work. We're not sure if it was an automated response (the Moira system was being taxed pretty hard) or if an individual actually revoked it. It's possible we were bogging down some aspect of the network and this was the easiest way to stop it.

We're hoping for the best. Nobody intended to be destructive, it was just a fun project.

I imagine requiring your users to fake a MAC Address is a pretty effective captcha. For Dropbox, it's probably better to reduce the friction in the sign up flow than to prevent against these kinds of edge cases.

"It duplicates all the styles, instead of grouping common selectors into one style definition like @extend does."

This didn't come through entirely until I read the comment. I think an example of what mixins would produce would be helpful.

At the end of the day we have two goals: 1) keeping things easy to develop and 2) keeping the CSS filesize as small as possible.

Mixins accomplished 1 but not 2.

One potentially relevant example is bootstrap's core "btn" class, which has over 50 lines: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/less/button...

When you want a button in HTML you have to add the btn class, as well as an additional class for that button's styling. IE: btn-large, btn-primary, btn-info

Bootstrap could have made this happen with just one class by implementing mixins, but that would result in each btn-primary, btn-info, etc repeating those 50 lines from the btn class.

If Bootstrap used @extend instead, that large btn class could be replaced with a multiple selector, IE: .btn-large, .btn-small, .btn-primary, etc. Then the independent styles could be defined below, as they already are, and we would just need one class to add the appropriate button style.

I guess they could do that today by just using the long selector instead of .btn, but that makes the file harder to maintain.

Let me know if I'm thinking about this wrong.

The tagline "Like Alibaba, But Safer" makes me think of Panjiva.com - have you guys heard of them?

(Disclosure: Roommate used to work there)

Author here. This is a somewhat of a follow on to another article, "Innovation in the Cruise industry... Where is it?" that you might also find interesting: http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/09/innovation-in-the-cruise...

Happy to get a little more into the specifics if anyone's interested. It took us a long time to get out of the "better ui, kill the travel agent" mindset that's prevalent among travel startups. The greater complexity of vacation sales really seems to throw most of the precedent set by online travel agencies (Expedia) and meta-searches (Kayak) out the window.

This. I don't think App.net would have worked a year ago, maybe even not six months ago. But now, with Twitter actively attacking their developers, I imagine we'll be seeing a ton of ports from Twitter to App.net.

Twitter definitely considered the risk of cutting off their development community, but I don't think they intended to hand those developers off to a competing platform. Good timing from App.net.

Note to everyone: it's career week at MIT.

Usually, a Silicon Valley investor at MIT during career week is trying to help their portfolio find staff. Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and more are here for that purpose, but that doesn't seem to be this event's goal. Can you clarify?

For my site in the travel industry, I need a bizdev guy to get me access to the APIs.

Also, not really. There are a ton of biz dev relationships that require more than just an API. Making a public API where "The constraints, the terms, everything is all there" probably isn't worthwhile if you don't plan for many to use the API. In the cruise industry, not many players want access to the cruise API, so they negotiate usage costs and commission individually.

Thank You.

This is ideal for freelancers. I built it for myself at https://paycolin.herokuapp.com out of fear that PayPal would freeze a large transaction I had coming in.

I started building the same thing (a general service for everyone) on www.charge99.com but never finished it. If you want that domain I'll push it to you for free

For what it's worth, my plan for getting it out there was to scoop up a ton of cheap domains on namepros.com, then create individual listings with "Payment through Charge99". Namepros is a very active domainers forum where it's common to list payment types in the listings.