jlind

[1] http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/howla...

Certainly frustrating.

It's one of my favorite parts about startup culture in general, though. Whenever I hear people saying stuff like this (re: hiring performance vs experience) my first thought is almost always "where do I sign up?!"

I'm in my senior year of college here in the US and this definitely nails it for me. I've had some solid internships where I've done actual coding / ops / etc, but I don't feel like I'm at the technical level where I could graduate and make huge impacts for a startup.

Are startups who are past the "Employee #1" phase (or even employees 2-5, I'd imagine) in a different position in regards to this? (ie more willing to bring on a recent grad, because they already have strong technical employees/leadership pushing the company forward)

First it was succeptible to killing the process, easy enough. Once that was blocked, we figured out that some clever use of some default applications in windows would cause it to crash and give us freedom. After those vulnerabilties were fixed or blocked, and we had tried pretty much anything else we could think of, someone figured out that hitting ctrl + alt while we logged in would prevent it from even loading in the first place!

Unfortunately it was pretty easy for our teacher to catch us in the silly act of banging on our keyboards at login.

My gut reaction is that most people wouldn't want Google on top of every other site they visit. Of course, I'm also amazed at how many toolbars I have seen people install and run concurrently in IE, so I could easily be wrong.

I'm not quite sure how high priority that should be, however. Maybe some sort of re-launch or re-purposing of Buzz would be in order after some time.

It would be nice to be able to set relative ratios for how often posts from different circles show up, to result in varying frequency of the top or recent posts from each circle.

EDIT: Based on the signup page[1], there are a handful of steps that likely represent what you'll do when you backup the blog. They seem to indicate more of a one-and-done process.

[1]http://tumblr.downstreamapp.com/sign-up/

I think the only thing they're really proving is what we already know: nearly everyone is vulnerable in one way or another; robust security is tough.

[1] http://twitter.com/#!/EveOnline/status/80732212898697217

I've found this is one of the more powerful and easy ways to prevent feature creep, at least for the smaller/shorter projects I have worked on. When I start with a UI, I find it's easier to ask what the bare minimum of a) inputs and b) feedback/guidance for the user that needs to exist. In the projects where I've started with a backend first, I often end up having to create more noise on the UI side to complete it.

I think this just goes back to your first point, how developers are more effective when we're involved in creating the requirements. Practicing good design is going to be more effective when you choose to focus on it up front, instead of relegating it to something to check off a list when the application has been developed.

Anecdote: Just the other day we had a request come through to have a flash video (with music) automatically play on the splash page for one of our bigger applications. We ended up taking it down the very next morning after the original requestor was getting bombarded with emails and phone calls about it. I hoped they might have learned from it, but their initial response was to just move the video to another page and continue to let it play automatically. We didn't let them make the same mistake twice, though.

As far as the homepage itself, I loved the simple layout. I can't comment on the demo section as I'm stuck with IE8 at work.

And here's another article from IBM about offline web/mobile apps in a more general sense: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-offlineweb/...

Hopefully these can help you out in some way!

Also a sidenote to the OP: the example app (tripador.com) seemed to be down for me.