mryall

Unfortunately, beforeidie.com seems to be registered to someone who isn't interested in using it.

Interesting idea. How much manual legwork do you have to do when a new customer registers? Is there manual effort involved in setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts, mailing lists, etc.? I imagine many of the online services you use would prevent automatic creation of accounts somehow, like with a CAPTCHA or something.

I agree that this doesn't come across so well with your current copy and examples. Some more realistic examples in your target markets might help to make this clearer.

Basically, the "Abe for President" line makes it seem very heavily targeted towards US citizens running for public office. I found it get past that initial impression.

I'm not so sure about that. Social problems like this are often deeply interesting because they don't have simple solutions.

That said, it's highly unlikely that a discussion about airport security is going to lead to anything other than idle griping about the situation. So maybe you're right and we should steer clear of the airport security line of discussion.

Oh, right. It's another one of those broken geographic domain-switching sites. It automatically redirects people in Australia to www.popsci.com.au, which doesn't have the relevant article.

Apologies for the flag, OP.

That's a cool idea. Accelerometer support for JS was added to iOS 4.2 [1], so it should be possible to modify the CSS transformations based on the DeviceOrientation [2].

[1] http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/safari-ios-accelerometer-webs...

[2] http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source-orientation.html

You definitely want to have a proper shareholder agreement and make sure any amateur investors understand the terms of it before going ahead.

Some potential problems: investors not understanding what kind of shares they have (probably non-voting) and expecting a say in where the company goes, investors expecting to be able to pull their money out or sell the shares when they feel like it, investors expecting dividends from your company when you want to retain all the profits. It's mostly about expectations, which can be managed if you're prepared up front.

Flagged: the link is broken.

Many companies need to scale up people as they grow because their ratio of human involvement to revenue produced isn't as high as 37signals'. Almost anything other than the specific style of product development that you guys do falls into this category.

The assumption when you publish an article is that you're doing it to provide examples to others, not just talk about how good you are. In that situation, I think it's fair to point out the limitations and areas where this strategy might not work.

The problems started when they forgot this rule for senior management and made the CEO a sales guy instead of an engineer.

> access to shared variables leads to race conditions ...

Race conditions are a type of programmer error, not an invariable consequence of shared state. You seem to be implying that high concurrency increases the risk of race conditions, which it doesn't. A race condition is either present or it isn't. A correctly written application that uses threads isn't inherently less reliable than a single-threaded application, it is just harder to write.

A guidelines link in the header would be a good idea.

It's interesting to argue that you should 16px fonts because that's the browser default size and browser vendors must have had a good reason, then in the next section argue that the default line-height is too small and needs to be increased. Are the browser defaults only logically chosen when they agree with your particular thesis?

The browser defaults are set the way they are to maximize compatibility with previous versions of browsers. The 16px font size is probably a relic from Mosaic or Netscape 1.0.

> Why they didn't go all the way and advocate fusion powered cars is beyond me.

Isn't that what the hydrogen is for? <g>

Energy can't be created or destroyed, just transformed from one form to another. So nothing is really an energy source. I'd say "energy source" is the vernacular for stored energy, in terms of where humans source their energy for machinery, electricity, etc.

This would be susceptible to the same problems as Chris mentions in his post:

> Companies like TapJoy let you pay to get in the Top 25, and then once you are there you can get “organic” downloads by being on the toplists.

If they can arrange to actually buy enough copies of an application to get into the Top 25, reviews posted by those accounts would surely weigh very highly under your proposed scheme as well.

Good idea. The benefits of user flagging was one of the more interesting points from Matt Haughey's presentation at SXSW a couple of weeks ago. The entire thing is well worth watching actually:

http://vimeo.com/21043675

A more difficult question is how you solve problems in a gigantic marketplace like the App Store. Better verification of sellers? Verification of review comments? Limiting cross-linking of apps? Tougher review process by Apple?

All of these would engender more criticism against Apple for policing their "walled garden" but is there a better way to solve it?

Oh, cool. The linked article about the rotary shutter also has a great animation showing how the camera works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_disc_shutter

It's a good reminder that with ubiquity comes an increased focus on security. I'm much more conscious of the security problems with Flash after a lot of recent news about it. However, it isn't necessarily because it's any less secure than other applications, just that it's ubiquitous and therefore a more likely avenue of attack.

That doesn't seem like it could be true. The film is rolling through the camera, and if the shutter were open continuously, the entire film would be a vertical blur of light. The shutter would open and close once per frame, so the film can be advanced. The actual shutter speed of a camera shooting 24 fps would be much faster than 1/24 s.

I think people will start to see that social networks don't add that much value to their lives, and they'll just stop using them. Maybe they'll meet up with friends for a chat, instead of sitting at home talking to each other online.

One of my colleagues has a very strict rule that he does not become friends with current work colleagues on Facebook or any other social network. Seems like a good idea to me, although there is sometimes a blurry line when you work with some of your good friends. I'm sure having such a rule makes him less concerned about the compromising photos or status postings.

Surfacing good links is part of the attraction of HN. Taking away the karma benefit for link sharing would lessen the incentive to share articles that don't actually need any discussion.

Ah yes, I had forgotten that resubmission counts as additional votes. I agree - it's not an ideal situation if posts get on the home page purely from automated submissions.

Do you mention it in your resume or cover letter? We try to look up information about people (blogs, open source contributions, etc.) before or between interview rounds, but it depends on how much the candidate pushes it and how much time the interviewer has to look into it.

Just having committed to an open source project would put you way ahead of most of the people we interview.

Jacques, perhaps you could configure your blog so you can choose to submit your own posts automatically to HN when you post them? That might reduce the tendency of people to try to rush and post them first, assuming the majority of posts are actually suitable for posting here.

I don't think you should worry too much about it either. Your posts seem to keep gathering a high number of votes whenever they appear on HN, so this is a sign that they are useful and relevant to the community. If an irrelevant link gets posted and it only gathers a few votes on the new page, then what have you lost? What has the community lost?

Yeah, Google supports the sitemaps standard but that doesn't really cater for content as dynamic as Stack Overflow's. The last-updated format is a day rather than a timestamp, for example, making it useless for very-frequently updated content.

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

Well, the necessity of scraping that much content would depend on how often it is being updated. There must be only a few thousand active pages on Stack Overflow on any given day, so executing a million-plus page views per day seems a bit overkill.

Google tends to reduce its crawl frequency for content that changes less frequently. Perhaps in SO's case, it struggles to identify recently changed content without crawling the entire site.

Wow, that's a great article. Perhaps even more interesting because of Github's growth in the three years since it was written.

I wonder if he didn't publish it because he started with the idea of publishing ten lessons. Might have been better to assign the number after the article was written.