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#0 Don't pay anything close to what the employee is worth. Underpay, furlough, slow-pay your best employees to really build that desire to see if the grass is greener elsewhere.

hiccupon Ask HN: I am 33. Is there still time to make a career in web development?

I talked with a man who worked in a client's company. He's 60+ years old and doing front end development in Javascript. I asked him how he managed to work in an office where the average developer age is probably 26.

Here's what he said to get his career rebooted:

1) Never think about your age

2) Use the language you want to work in. He did a lot of little project for non-profits. Great experience, but also covered the employment gaps in his resume.

3) Become an expert - answer questions on ExpertExchange (he started 8 years ago, pre StackOverlow). He became one of the top JS guys on that site

4) Put up resources on a personal site - his EE posts would link to his personal site with CSS, HTML, and JS examples. I checked it out and a lot were still applicable. Date formatting and regex's never go out of style.

5) Hustle for that first job - he literally opened the phone book and called around for work. After his expertise became better known and the market for frontend work got hot, recruiters sought him out. All those EE links to his personal site helped his Google ranking.

So go do it. Don't blame your age. Work harder.

hiccupon No Bread, Beer or Biscuits: How I Lost 63lbs in 100 Days

Here's the author when he's heavy: https://www.everpix.com/public.html?id=cKG7XXCRD8BUu1tC

And at the 1 year anniversary of his epic hangover: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterjlambert/8753966380/

hiccupon Show HN: Formbuilder.js

Nice plug. Bonus for relevancy.

hiccupon Shot tower

This is also how cheese balls are made.

hiccupon Steve Ballmer email to Microsoft employees on Nokia acquisition

"Now is the time to build on this momentum and accelerate our share and profits in phones."

Do they even have profits to accelerate on?

hiccupon Alice.com shuts down

I didn't know what Alice.com was. Here's a blurb from a press release:

Alice.com provides eCommerce and interactive marketing services exclusively to the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry. The company’s eCommerce platform allows CPG manufacturers to create branded storefronts that make it easy for the mainstream consumer to buy all of their household goods online. Co-founders Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire have an entrepreneurial track record that includes three previous start-up successes: Bizfilings.com (sold to Wolters-Kluwer in 2001), NameProtect.com (sold to Corporation Services Corporation in 2007), and Jellyfish.com (sold to Microsoft Corporation in 2007).

And a link to google's cache of the home page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jXbidML...

hiccupon Amazon was down

Amazon site seems to be up now.

hiccupon Amazon was down

My EC2 instances are still running fortunately.

hiccupon Icahn Enterprises Issues Statement Regarding Twitter Account of Chairman

This is in the context of Icahn announcing he had a large position in Apple and had a phone call with Tim Cook. This then led to a 5% increase in share price. Basically 2 tweets worth $17 Billion in Apple's market value.

hiccupon Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared

I'd have preferred all the hosting times use the same scale on the left hand side to more easily relate response times. It would also have been cool to see all of the graphs stacked on top of each other in one graph or visually grouped the separate graphs together in a single page's height.

I guess as a marketing piece it gets some interest, but it lacked in actual utility for me.

hiccupon Show HN: Create Javascript charts with one line of Ruby

Great meta graphing library. Love that Google Charts AND Highcharts are supported.