leftnode

Is this something you can really plan out from the beginning? How many millions of developers would love to be able to create a product that drives enough attention to ensure an acquihire?

Who knows, you might be right and some developers might be able to think of an idea, build it, and market it successfully enough to get the acquihire they want (along with a big paycheck), but I suspect most just want to build a product _someone_ finds useful.

Maybe not everyone subscribes to the Heroku mailing list or the list of all new software released ever and hadn't heard about it?

Thank you for saying this. I also do a ton of PHP development and it's so fucking tiring. Just stop with the posts already and get some shit done.

Or maybe that's why there are so many divorces!

Like the article said, you can't use it with function calls because empty() itself is a construct of the language and not a function. So, empty(someFunc()) is an error. You'd have to put the return value of someFunc() in a variable and test it for emptiness, or do something like if (0 == strlen(someFunc())) { /* .. */ } which is overly verbose and not fast.

Better than parameter skipping would be named parameters so you could just do:

    function foo($a, $b="10", $c="5", $d="3") { /* .. */ }

    foo(5, $c="10");

That way $a == 5, $b == "10", $c == "10", and $d == "3". Much better and cleaner syntax in my opinion and a lot of other languages support something similar.

The two biggest issues for me have to deal with communicating with groups of people.

First, I hate being involved with an email conversation between several people that lasts for days and you end up with a 100 email long chain. It's difficult to wade through the crap, everyone has their 10 line signature and the useless privacy warning for a 1 line email. It's annoying and very inefficient.

The other annoyance is not being able to unsubscribe yourself from threads that no longer are of interest to you.

This happened recently at work. I was communicating with our QA manager and our clients QA manager. I had taken care of my part, and they continued the conversation through email yet I still received every email because they would just reply all. Eventually I had to send an email and say "next time you send an email, please remove my name from the list unless I actually need to read the contents of the email."

To me, a simple solution to this is a threaded message board (even ones as simple as like vBulletin and the like from the early 2000's, obviously built with better technologies).

With a message board you have control over how much information you consume, but if someone really wants to send you something, they can send you a private message and ask you to join a conversation. You subscribe to threads of conversation, and then unsubscribe when they no longer interest you.

Find a way to do that in an email client and I'd easily pay $100 for that piece of software.

Maybe they're building their own data center? Or really trying to expand into the enterprise market by going up head to head with Atlassian (expanding their issues and Wiki tools to complete separate packages). All speculation, of course.

https://github.com/blog/1189-investing-in-github Straight from them. Congratulations on building such a great business.

How so?

It's standard practice to encrypt your emails when sending potential security notifications to the party that you're notifying. Not only does it keep out prying eyes, it ensures the person sending the email is who they say they are.

This type of redesign is not needed. Full redesigns are rarely needed. In my opinion, they should have spent several months changing small pieces of their site and testing how well people respond to the changes.

Or, to satisfy both crowds, the title could have had " ... 10,000 m^2 (107,000 ft^2) ... ".

The paragraph

When Mayer suspects an employee might burn out, she asks them to find their rhythm. They've come back with, "I need to be home for Tuesday night dinners," or "I need to be on time for my daughter's soccer games."

really bothers me. If employee burnout is a regular thing inside your organization, that's a serious issue that needs solving. But to have to ask permission to spend time with your family is ridiculous.

If you're working 130 hours a week, something is seriously, seriously wrong.

It looks like CodeAcademy.com redirects to CodeCademy.com.

I imagine a lot of young children bonded with their fathers over this show. My father and I have been listening for 20+ years. Car Talk will be greatly missed.

I imagine things like this is a result of the account management part of LinkedIn being built years ago when we thought plain-jane sha1 was ok to use, and then they just never got around to using bcrypt.

Ironically, the algorithm to upgrade to bcrypt is simple. Add a flag to the account table if they've upgraded or not. Next time the user signs in successfully, re-hash their password with bcrypt, toggle the flag, and update the password_hash value in the database.

The salt may have been stored in a separate database table and not distributed with this list (if they were salted, which apparently they aren't).

I used to work for Quickoffice and it's an incredible group of people. Very well deserved. Congratulations to everyone there!

I'll reserve judgement until the case is concluded, but something I see repeated with this is that they are a very diverse firm. That's great and progressive.

It still doesn't mean something like this couldn't happen.

The man just happened to be named Tony Stark.

I'm working on getting an actual privacy policy on the site right now.

That's a good question, I'll have to think about it.

Hah, no, it isn't. I reset mine as well and it was "moron." followed by some random characters.

This sites design is....not good. The font is hard to read at that size, the icons are blurry, the quotes at the bottom look like endorsements on first view.

Needs some more time in the oven I think.

I stopped playing it solely because I wholly disagree with Zynga the company and how they operate.

Exactly. I love GitHub, but they are a bit pricey. If I can get a professional tool for $10 (I have between 1-5 developers) rather than $25 a month, I'm there.

I think you have to assume worst case: if they have access to your database, they have access to your web root. It might not be the case, but you should assume that.

I just switched from MySQL to Postgres for everything (as a result of seeing how powerful and stable it is at my full time job) and it is simply amazing. Easily one of the most impressive pieces of software built.

You could probably easily buy a computer with Linux on it today from Ebay for around $100. Installing Linux means you have a wealth of ways to instantly write code (gcc, g++, ruby, python, php, perl, and a browser where you can write Javascript) and there are plenty of places to go when it's capabilities run out.

I think it's even easier to buy all of this today.

Or, have I totally misunderstood what you've said?

PHP will be at the top of this poll and the other poll of favorite languages.