lethain

Although I'd agree with the second part (that PG and RTM were exceptionally more productive than the Joe Schmoe the programmer), I don't think the Trevor Blackwell example is a good one.

I think it's routine for me, and most anyone, to write a first version of a system over a week or two and keep noticing ways the design could be improved. Over time cruft accumulates--and you continue to notice new problems you didn't anticipate when you first designed--and almost always it is much quicker to rewrite a second version than the first.

The 3 lines of code per day metric seems fishy to me, but it seems to be based on systems level projects (lets build a new operating system) rather than making a new PHP photoalbum for Grandma. It would be very interesting to see numbers which broke down LOC/day for different subsets of programming jobs.

Although it depends on individuals, I imagine most of the crowd here, myself included, doesn't have any hesitations about designing systems ground up from scratch. Some times you screw up and have to redesign later, but that's part of the process of learning.

That said, it would take exceptional circumstances for me to work on such a project. Programmer time has a high market value, and--personally--I'm still having a hard time not looking at your idea as asking programmers to work on your idea for free.

Project management that your discussing is a non-issue until the project grows considerably. I think for many programmers it would feel like you were just taking credit for their work, rather than providing a valued service. People become project leaders by contributing publicly recognized effort and talent to the project, and I just don't believe the efforts you are suggesting would be viewed as valuable.

Could you be a bit more clear? Are you asking if an individual can come up with some idea, write a blog post about it, and have other people build it?

Yes, that can definitely happen, but only if the original person has capital. Most developers who do opensource work have a bunch of ideas and projects they'd like to be working on, so you're going to have to pay them to work on your project instead. Payment doesn't have to be money, it can be reputation or an exchange of services, but basically you have to have something to contribute.

Otherwise you're asking them to do something for you for goodness sake without actually put any effort into the project yourself. In particular if you want to be the legal or cultural head of the project, people will sniff that funk immediately.

This article buys into the idea that entrepreneurship is hard, and most people can't do it. Beyond being an exercise in self-love, this is the perspective that the 'big dumb companies' crave. Whether we say "damn, I'm not good enough to leave" or we say "damn, I'm one of the few that is good enough to get out", we're still buying into the vision that industrialists wrought for us a century ago.

Pre-industrialism, essentially everyone was self-employed (if we want a specific example, lets take the USA 150 years ago, rather than regressing into feudalism or Egyptian slaves); despite the posited inability of non-elites to be entrepreneurs. The barriers to entrepreneurship are not inherent flaws in the majority of humanity, but intentionally manufactured barriers to promote the industrial model of production and consumption.

Whenever you're cribbing euphemisms off of eight year old 50 Cents' songs, then you're probably driving the wrong way down a one way street.

It's an interesting idea, although for me personally I much prefer using a general tool that can hold that data and connect it with other data, rather than a myriad of applications each with a separate reservoir of data.

My only specific complaint is that I found the video player to be a bit wack on WebKit nightly.

Nginx.

Look into Caja http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/ it lets you safely imbed third party JavaScript into your pages.

It'll be slightly strange entering any field at 31 when many others are getting started at 21. Other people your age will have ten years of experience and you'll be still getting the hang of the ropes for the first time, but unless you have a problem with that, no one else should either. :) The reason people in the book are 5-7 years younger is that it paints a more romantic picture, not because there aren't older people there getting equally successful. To the extent that young people succeed where older people don't, it's because younger people tend to have fewer obligations and a work-life balance more stilted towards work.

If you're going out to work as an employee, even at a startup, it's unlikely that you're going to make it big time, but it's fairly likely that you can make it an interesting, positive and lucrative five to seven years. (If 10% of startups are successful and it takes 2-3 years to figure out if a startup has succeeded or failed, then you'd only get a 20-40% chance of being in a successful startup, and even then employees are unlikely to cash out in a big way in a short timeframe.)

In this case, with low risk comes medium reward. :)

Good point. I think I'd considered that at some point but lost track of the idea somewhere before implementation. :)

I put together a simple resume website experimenting with ways to add context to skills on resumes. I list a number of projects, and when you hover over each project then the corresponding skills in a word cloud change color and enlarge. In my mind it does a much better job than a paper resume as clarifying which skills are actually in active use and which are paper skills.

My example is at http://willarson.com/ , but its simple to make your own ( http://lethain.com/entry/2008/oct/18/r-i-p-your-resume-site-... ).

That's a pretty broad question. Rather than talk of switching from asp.net to Django, it's important to just run out and do a few quick and dirty projects to get your feet wet. From there you can make a personal decision about it.

If you're looking to learn new things, instead of just picking up a new framework, I think there is a lot to be said for stringing together your own framework. In that regard, PHP is a really easy way to get started, although the language isn't overwhelmingly gorgeous.

Django does open up some interesting work opportunities, especially it's somewhat over-represented in the small/medium newspaper world.

The most effective way to drive traffic to a new blog is to write consistent, targeted and high quality content (keep your posts on-topic, especially early on), and to get to know the other people in the niche (they're not competition, but fellow members of a community). I really don't believe there are any other ways to attract high quality traffic.

That said, I'd really recommend that you step back and figure out an agenda for your blog. Are you trying to educate readers? Learn by writing? Develop a reputation as a competent programmer or as a member of a community? If you go into blogging aiming at pageviews, you run the risk of writing junk simply because it appeals to readers from Reddit or Digg, but doesn't accomplish anything positive for your personal brand.

By the author's admission, this was apparently reposted without permission. As he doesn't mention any license permitting his posting, I get the uncomfortable vibe of content theft.

It sounds like the non-technical founder wants to be an investor. Which would be fine if they are investing enough money to buy their stake, but if they aren't, then you need to make sure that they'll have a specific role in the company that they're willing to play, and that both you and the third founder feel is important. Otherwise, you're not cofounders, and you need to figure out a different way for splitting things.

If you're willing to handle the stuff yourself, and it isn't that bad, SliceHost is a charm. I've hosted my django based blog (600-1000 uniques per day, ~6000 some peak days) on a 512 megabyte vps (Apache2 with mod_python, nginx for static files and proxying other requests to the Apache2, memcached instances with maybe 32 megs (not a lot of content to cache), and postgres) for the past 8 or 9 months and it's been great. On a 256 meg vps it used to crash, but 512 has been golden with my traffic levels.

Oh, and its $38/month for 516 meg slice. Can't say enough kind words about 'em (if you're willing to fire up SSH yourself:).

0. Can't figure out what your added value is.

1. Buttons which do nothing ("expand to show further panels...").

2. The question marks after "Change Location, etc" are really sized badly.

3. You are displaying escaped HTML in the right most scroll ('<b>Obama</b> says that...').

4. You inlined all the scripts AND stylings.

5. Design is very busy and doesn't look professional. In particular the 'WebLivz' box in the top left doesn't match theme and clips over existing text.

6. 'Please get involved' text isn't centered.

In summary, the site feels thrown together and adhoc. There are little problems, and bigger ones. I don't think this has enough polish or focus to be released for public consumption.

You need to a) simplify the design, and b) explain your added value to users, because it isn't clear how this is going to replace my RSS feeds.

Sorry to be critical of your work, but it really needs more polish before you start asking for public feedback.

I think the issue is that it has never been 'his own time and money', but instead the Florida taxpayers' money and the justice systems time.

Well, I'm not sure if this a troll or not, but if it isn't, then it seems to hail back to the longstanding misunderstanding of what 'hacker' means. Hacker News is for people who want to a) build cool things, and b) make money. Not so much about vigilante justice.

Well, both Pownce and Twitter send these, and I pretty much ignore them. To the extent that they are expected, they are expected because we are used to being treated badly, not because they are a good thing.

I'd try communicating via a blog and also via one-off messages sent to users the first time they log in after a change. Both of those provide information without being too pushy about it.

I use PyObjC, and it's makes Cocoa development quicker and less painful, but it isn't a replacement for knowing Objective-C. Especially when you get into the CoreGraphics stuff and occasionally crash through the floor into OpenGL, Python isn't going to save you (much to my regret).

Despite the negative hype against HTML/JS, it isn't hard to create cross-browser code using that combination. I wrote a project called sparklines.js a while back, which uses the canvas element and it renders appropriately on all major browsers (including IE using http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/). The speed of javascript is going to be sufficient as well for anything except the most extreme projects (I also wrote ptdef.com, which is a tower defense game in html/javascript. It plays poorly on I.E. but fine in more modern browsers, and its far more complex (pathfinding, etc) than the JavaScript you'll probably be dealing with).

Beyond that, using an html/javascript combination you can create content that renders correctly on the iPhone, in desktop applications (well, at least on OSX you can use the WebView to render arbitrary html/css/javascript), and on the web. It's also an open stack, which is my largest complaint against AIR.

In the end, though, I think the hard part should be developing the underlying algorithm to display the visualizations you are interested in, and transplanting it to another platform later shouldn't be impossible. Where you start out really depends on what you want to build. ;)

I think it will be interesting to watch how the web developer community responds to this. The negative sentiment against Microsoft seems to make it 'unacceptable' for Microsoft to deviate or innovate, because that will interfere with standards compliance.

It goes without saying that the other browsers have been deviating for years as well, but... somehow logic doesn't seem to factor into it much.

I wrote a similar tutorial a while back using Python and BeautifulSoup (http://lethain.com/entry/2008/aug/10/an-introduction-to-comp...). BeautifulSoup doesn't learn in any sense of the word, but it plays very nicely with malformed (even extraordinarily malformed) html, and you can usually do things in a way that is resistant to changes (a combination of tag and id|class is usually fairly resistant to non-drastic changes).

Even if you don't reply, typically the spammer will receive an 'undeliverable notice' from invalid accounts, so silence ought to indicate where an addresses exist.

Personally, I wish we could de-normalize the data, and compare countries in raw quantity of queries. Its not entirely clear how the data is being normalized at the moment, but its certainly imperfect.

As far as I can tell, the way it is being normalized is relatively popularity for the search term within search terms in that category. I.E. that 'Python' was the most popular (relative to other programming search terms) in Cuba. This means that it is, in a way, trying to normalize over programming population (if we accept the somewhat plausible premise that only programmers are searching for programming topics), but the results still aren't great.

It would be nice if Google made some raw data available, but I'm not holding my breath. :/

Its full lineage is that it's an authorized republishing of my article at http://lethain.com/entry/2008/jun/26/sparklines-in-javascrip... although the reposter reworded the title.

That said, it does mostly just take examples from the documentation, but the documentation is mine as well. ;)

Actually, it does work on IE, because it uses the excanvas library from Google. Most canvas operations can be emulated this way, only failing when a high level of performance is necessary (i.e. I made a tower defense game in the canvas and it played very poorly in IE, although it did play).