danielh

Thanks for pointing that out. There is more current work from the same faculty which shows how far the research has come:

Towards Battery-Free HD Video Streaming http://batteryfreevideo.cs.washington.edu/

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16881946

Firing someone is always hard, no doubt about it. But I disagree that it's bad for team morale to fire a nice underperformer. In fact, I've seen the opposite happen, where having to drag along a team member was a reason for people leaving.

IMHO, hiring based on homework is no guarantee that you won't end up with a bad hire anyway. It is just another imperfect data point to base your decision on, but one that comes at the cost of massively reducing your number of candidates.

I don't get it. The whole industry is complaining about not being able to hire developers, yet there seems to be some kind of competition who can come up with the most awkward hiring process.

Requiring homework is a great way to deter the kind of people companies should be most interested in hiring: those who are not actively looking for a new job.

I find this trend especially surprising considering that the U.S. has at-will employment where you can fire anyone anytime (at least that is my understanding, I'm from Germany). Why not get people at a desk quickly and evaluate them on the job?

Maybe they are collecting enough data about you that they don't feel the need to bother you. Are you signed in to Facebook in your primary browser? Do you have the mobile app running in the background?

Since I've signed out of Facebook on my PC and kill the mobile Facebook app while not using it, I tend to get multiple push notifications per day, most of them asking if I know some random person.

My girlfriend, who is on Facebook daily, has never seen any of these notifications.

Think of it as a slightly less insulting form of FizzBuzz.

I regularily used a similar exercise to weed out bad candidates. The task was to build a stack with based on a double linked. Looking up stuff was okay, but straight copy paste was not. I gave them half a day and told them to write the best code they can.

There where many discussions how that exercise is relevant to the junior PHP dev position we were hiring for (spoiler: it's not). But it gives you a good idea what the candidate considers good code (consistent code style, documentation, tests,...)

Nexmo's CEO also seems to be active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jamingo

WhatsApp doesn't share that opinion: the number got blocked shortly after submission.

Keep in mind that ASP.NET 1.0 was published in January 2002 and PoF was launched in 2003. It was actually a side project to learn the latest hot technology.

AFAIK, an employer gets fully reimbursed by the health insurance for the paid maternity leave.

Well, US$ 4000 is 2950€. 2950€ net equals about 5100€/monthly before taxes, social security and health insurance. 61.2k€ per year does not sound totally unreasonable.

Edit: this is more or less worst case, i.e. highest tax class and public health insurance.

The question was not whether native apps generally make sense, but whether "the government should also be investing heavily in mobile apps?"

And I think that the policy to focus on mobile web first is sound for that use case.

Well, IANAL. I think you already covered the most important point: store backups on hardware/services under the control of your employer/client.

I would document the backup process and communicate it to my manager/client with a mail like "hey, I set up backups, they are stored at <server>, docs are in the wiki".

Other potential issues: causing unauthorized costs ("who stored 10TB on S3?") or privacy violations, e.g. when working with healtcare or payment data.

That is good advice, just make sure that it doesn't look like you are stealing your customers/clients data.

They couldn't compete if they would "back it up on the cloud". They build their own custom storage servers, this way they "can reliably store and retrieve data at up to 25 times lower than the cost of other services such as Amazon S3 by using our own purposed-designed cloud storage". [1]

[1] http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming...

"Security is a scaling issue" is a dangerous assumption to make.

While a small site might not be targeted directly, you might still get hit by an automatic attack if you use any off the shelf software. It's not fun when Google marks your site as harmful because your OpenX-Ad-Server suddenly serves malicious ads.

Self-driving cars could form convoys to utilize slipstream. You could reduce the safety distance, because the reaction time compared to a human driver is massively reduced. Additionally, the driving style of the average driver leaves a lot of room for improvement.

The problem with many articles about REST is that they revolve around the question how to make your API more RESTful, and rarely answer why (and if) it actually makes sense to do so.

I think that proper use of HTTP methods is one of the core ideas of REST, but I understand that one might have to take shortcuts like _method to satisfy real-life needs while calling it RESTful to satisfy the buzz-word hungry PHB.

Let's just agree not to do something like GET /foo?_method=DELETE

The malicious script only inserted an iframe with a broken link, so I wouldn't worry to much.

FWIW, I just visited your site and it contained some compressed JavaScript at the top and a broken link to http: // gsdgsd.freewww.biz/showthread.php?t=72881717 (slightly obfuscated to avoid accidential clicks). It was gone after a reload, so I can't give you any more information.

I presented my findings at the HN Cologne Meetup yesterday evening and one attendant had the same issues with Hacker News HD. I guess I have to revise my conclusions.

That is strange, Hacker News HD works fine for me and never crashed during my tests. I found Hacker News! (the app with the blue icon) to be very unstable.

Well, it is available on the store. I didn't check the support pages, to be honest.

Unfortunately, the situation on the iPad is similar, 2 out of 5 apps are totally useless and the reviews don't really help. That's why I wrote this review.

Don't feel bad. I have to admit, I too was thinking that your project description was pretty detailed but somehow lacking, until I learned about the 1000 character limit, which "Mr. Case" forgot to mention or wasn't aware of. So I think it is really not your fault, but a shortcoming of Tinyproj, similar to the somewhat vague "timeframe" field. Considering the maturity of Tinyproj I'm confident that Kyle will iron out these wrinks.

The importance of proper rehearsal cannot be emphasized enough. Record yourself during practice and don't stop until you would be comfortable with uploading the result to Youtube. With enough practice, you can be confident that you will be within the time limit. Once you know what to say without thinking, you can also focus on other aspects of your presentation, like making eye contact with your audience, good posture or avoiding fill words like er, um, etc.

Also, never rely on the internet connection at the venue and bring adapters if you have a Mac.

The app is basically a Facebook client, so I would not consider it scammy to put "for Facebook" into the name. Other apps are doing that as well, e.g. "Twitterrific for Twitter" [1].

There might be a trademark issue, but I didn't check the Facebook ToS.

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twitterrific-for-twitter/id35...

I suggest that you mention that adding the campaign button to the page is only a matter of adding the generated HTML snippet, something like "it's as simple as embedding a YouTube video". Maybe you can also create a separate step-by-step video that shows the creation of a campaign and integration into e.g. a Wordpress post.

That's a great looking product for such a short time. I really like the looks of the video, but for me it was a bit light on information. You are explaining how the viral effect works, but I also want to know how the campaign creator works. Will I get a code snippet I have to integrate into my page? Do I have to host anything myself? It looks like the only way to find out is to create a campaign.

Out of curiosity, did you create this in 72 hours straight, i.e. a long weekend, or stretched out over several evenings?

It reloads the whole page.

Of course you can sell a small business, the question is at what price. If your potential for growth is limited, you won't get a Twitter-like valuation, but if your business is solid and profitable, someone might be willing to pay a couple times your earnings.