304 karma · joined November 12, 2011
My nephew, an avid basketball player, has been unemployed for three years, yet the NBA is bringing in basketball players from other countries!
This article makes the incorrect assumption that if two people have the same job title, they must have the same skills. I was initially surprised that a "leading authority on H-1B visas" would make this mistake, but it turns out he is a professor rather than someone with any experience in the software industry, which explains why his arguments are driven by statistics without any understanding of how the industry works.
I guess the GemFury folks just wish they could get as much publicity as CureBit did, even if it's mostly negative.
In summary, these practices are extremely common, and Ben Horowitz recommends them. However, they are technically illegal in California.
This is not illegal, merely poor form and also a bad technical decision because the other site can then control you.
If this were illegal, you would have to get permission from other sites to use iframes. Things like stumbleupon's web version couldn't exist.
In this case, Curebit was only copying the design of a landing page, so it was probably not worth pissing off DHH even if that landing page was legally usable and worked better. Although it really seems that DHH was more pissed off by Allan's tweets and posts about it than by the design itself.
Look at what Zynga did with FarmVille. At first, it was exactly like FarmTown. Same appearance, same menu layout, same gameplay. They weren't actually serving assets from FarmTown's servers, but besides that, the design was exactly the same.
Was this illegal? Probably not - design like this generally can't be copyrighted.
Was this successful? Yes - this sort of strategy led Zynga to be worth billions of dollars.
Was this ethical? I think intelligent people will differ.
Either way, DHH certainly uses his audience to attack people who come too close to the design of 37signals. A similar thing happened when Google launched Huddle, and DHH complained it was too similar to Campfire. In the end, Google rebranded it as a PR move and nobody cared any more.
Whether it's ethical or not, it certainly seems like a tactical PR mistake for a startup to annoy DHH this much.
That's true. But think about a smart programmer who is fresh out of school, or maybe dropped out. If you don't have anything on your resume yet, this could be a reasonable way to break into the tech scene.
The new twitter is a dreary testament to the deceased neurons of the new management.
This sort of comment doesn't belong on Hacker News. There's nothing here besides insulting Twitter in a way that uses interesting words.
aa = lava
ab = your abs
ad = tv ads
ae = scottish "one"
ag = agricultural
ah = ah that feels good
ai = a sloth
al = a tree
am = i am happy
an = an apple
ar = arrr i'm a pirate
as = as you were
at = where you at
aw = aww that's cute
ax = the weapon
ay = ay caramba
than it is to memorize "abdeghilmnrstwxy".
It's hard to imagine a less reliable source. And that sentence is the only real news in the article!
Myth #2 – Introverts are shy.
From dictionary.com:
noun: 1. a shy person.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/introvert
If you want to use the word "introvert" to support some psychological theory, that's fine. Just don't act like everyone else has been misusing the word all along.
One suggestion if you take this further is to add a "dictionary" or "hash table" type. For practical programming problems, that is pretty necessary.
But a really neat project - it's cool to see a functional programming take on the CoffeeScript-style compiling-to-javascript.
(spoiler alert)
Once you figure the guesses have to be based on the coin flip you can see, it's pretty straightforward because there just aren't that many possible strategies. Sam always guesses that the coin he can't see is the same as the one he can see, whereas Dirk always guesses they are different. If they are the same, Sam is right and Dirk is wrong. Otherwise, Dirk is right and Sam are wrong. Each is right 50% of the time, they just ensure they are never right at the same time.
Not to be too harsh - it's just three engineers, so it makes sense if the setup is still evolving.