kvermeer

The system messages don't have a close button, they're usually used for important site status updates such as "There will be a short network wide outage starting on date at time for system maintenance".

The use of the tool for memorials to Steve Jobs or for political messages like this is extremely rare.

It's a good thing that you read the status messages. Normally, they're important.

I believe that it's in this combination guide:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing-A-Guitar-String/718/1

It looks like "Use two lamps on the object, one on each side." is the recommended lighting scheme. A light tent would certainly be an asset.

Add the tag yourself! My profile [1] features EMBEDDED C, PCB-DESIGN, and DSP tags. EMBEDDED C existed, I created the other two. EMBEDDED and EMBEDDED SW were also extant when I got here, but there's currently no search feature to see who else uses these tags or what projects used them.

I think HARDWARE is too ambiguous; this could apply to anything from implementing a task on a breadboard to architecting a server rack.

That said, Thomas said that they were working on improved tag features as fas [sic, he's working fast!] as they could. [2].

I've suggested this on the UserVoice tracker [3].

[1]: http://www.weekendhacker.net/hackers/Kevin%20Vermeer

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238678

[3]: http://weekendhacker.uservoice.com/forums/138659-general/sug...

Looks like this was already suggested by jdludlow [1]

> * The tags should be links so that I can click one and filter on all projects with that tag.

Or was that not what you meant?

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3238678

The part that's suspicious is the $25 price point (the BeagleBoard is $125, the BeagleBone is $90, the Gumstix is $150-$250 depending on configuration). How many products can you name for under $50 (2x the cost of the Raspberry Pi) that approach its specs and capabilities? Also, they're aiming for user-friendliness to the point where it is supposed to be an educational product for young people.

These are both really, really hard to do. The foundation seems to be approaching this goal fairly well; if it is vaporware they have documented it quite well indeed. Having volunteers like their director and trustee Eben, who is an architect at Broadcomm, and trustee and operations director Pete, who is the managing director of a PCB manufacturer, can't hurt on getting this thing spec'ed out. Whether or not those relationships will last once this gets rolling is the shaky part.

Don't get me wrong, the team seems like a great group of people, and I trust them to have good intentions. However, I don't give anything approaching trust to Broadcomm.

All involve awk or sed. That cuts out a large portion of the potential userbase...

Perhaps common uses could be wrapped in options to the script? For instance, an option to graph numbers on separate lines, to graph all numbers in the input in order, to graph a specific column of information (like passing through cut first) or to graph commonly graphed sources?

You held your friends' unwillingness to return a favor against him and destroyed a friendship?

I'm sorry, but that's just immature, and it's possible that by disconnecting from you your 'friend' made a wise move. It's just three hours of time; your friend is a human being. I interpret social debt as a proxy to good manners, and nothing more. I freely <strike>loan</strike>gift money, time, and stuff to my friends and relatives, and I make a point to forget about it ASAP. It's just stuff! It makes me sad when people let transient stuff like 3 hours, a broken borrowed tool, or a $20 IOU get in the way of your relationships. If your friend hesitates to call you because they expect that you'll ask about "when are you going to teach me that/return this/refund that" then there's something wrong. Life is about people, not time you've spent in the past, the stuff you own, or the money in your wallet. Do something kind today.

A system to correlate helpfulness should be implemented to prevent help vampires[1] from draining the site's users, but it shouldn't be featured too prominently. Perhaps anonymous exit surveys could be used to determine reputation, visible on a users' profile? Something like "User participated in X projects and received an average rating of Y/5 for contributions", and users with extremely low ratings could get "You've been warned" annotations.

The system probably doesn't even need to specify whether the user volunteered help or requested help for the project; this tool will only thrive if there are plenty of projects to do, and it can be hard to come up with good ones. Unless, of course, I'm misinterpreting this and the project authors don't participate in the effort, which could make this difficult.

I don't see this as much as an IOU exchange center as an opportunity to work on stuff I love to do with people I haven't yet connected with.

[1]: http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

Please don't restrict this to web developers. This could be useful for lots of other fields:

    - Academics: This data just got published, let's analyze it!
    - Native app programmers: Open source application X lacks 
      feature Y, let's add it!
    - Embedded system developers: The arduino/mbed/BeagleBoard lacks
      a driver for this system, let's write it!
    - Physical constructs: This seniors neighborhood in Grand Rapids
      lacks wheelchair ramps, let's build some!

Some would obviously be location dependent, and you'd be much more dependent on tags to filter content (which is OK, as long as you have a good system to manage tags), but this could be much bigger than it currently is.

With sufficient size, you could probably get some good advertising revenue - users are willing to tell you precisely what they love to do, and I don't think they'd mind a few ads on these topics. I'd definitely go for the ad-supported model for this one.