palehose

Unless you are specifically looking to avoid responsibility for this debt and are planning to let your startup sink, I don't understand why you wouldn't pay for your debt with a credit card.

I have seen something similar happen to a co-worker who was starting at the same time as me at a new job. When he was hired, he was promised a management position with a higher salary than other developers, including myself. After working at the company for a couple of weeks, the company said they did not need him as a manager and wanted to reduce his salary to be the same as other developers. The guy ended up going back to his old company and getting his old job back because he was not willing to drop his salary requirement at the new job.

If you are able to complete the project and there are problems with it in the future, you may just be giving yourself future work when the client needs those bugs fixed.

I don't know what the specific implementation of each company is, but having a separate program for email delivery makes the most sense compared to using qmail or any other off the shelf MTA. There is most likely an MTA that is used to receive mail, but a separate program can be used to deliver mail from the same machine. There is a Javamail API, for example, which has been open sourced and can be used to deliver email from any java program. Threading is an important issue here since it is possible to have as many open connections as you want to deliver mail, but you would not want all of your open threads to be attempting to send emails to one domain all at once. Reputation determines how many emails get accepted or are bounced.

This game would be much more punishing if it did not keep repeating the same piece over and over again. The way that a piece would repeat itself until just before a line is cleared makes the game's AI way too obvious.

Call it stealing if you want, but here is a little tutorial on how to get the non-free Consolas font without buying anything from Microsoft. The font is included in a free to download dmg file from microsoft. http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/

I don't understand why someone wouldn't be able to create more than one GMail account and use separate accounts for separate google related purposes? (Use one GMail account for RSS and a seperate GMail account for App Engine, etc)

There is still the possibility that everyone you give information to is tied to a single GMail account (for your own convenience), but that is still your own fault, not Google.

Whatever happened to conflict of interest objectivity? People are less likely to trust a review from someone who is making money off of saying how great a product is.

Companies also have the ability to identify potential customers by researching what someone says on a social network. If a Zappos employee read someone's tweet about having sore feet and was able to recommend a pair of shoes that you would be interested in buying, would that be as big of turn off to you as well?

There is definitely a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" sort of relationship to social networking.

Once upon a time I used MySpace, and found all the info I would get on it completely useless. So I stopped using MySpace. Within the last 4 months, just about everyone in my family has started using Facebook, and I have no interest in joining Facebook whatsoever, because to me it seems like it is just a cleaner web interface to the same sort of thing I could read on MySpace.

But lately, whenever I talk to someone in my family they will ask me why I haven't joined Facebook yet. I prefer to just get in touch with my family over phone calls and in person, I don't need to drill down into every last detail of their lives on a daily basis. So I continue to remain outside of the realm of Facebook.

I do like Twitter though, and no one in my family or within my close friends is using it, and they don't want to use it. It doesn't bother me that the people I follow and who follow me on twitter are mostly people outside of my family and are not my closest friends. A lot of the things I write on Twitter aren't things I think they would care about anyways.

Why hasn't Pair Programming extended itself beyond just programming? What about something like "Pair Accounting"? "Pair Book Writing"? I don't see anyone arguing that the cubicle office is fundamentally flawed, except for in cases where people are anti-social and don't like each other.

From the article:

> A new chef at the highly rated San Francisco restaurant Ducca decided to make his mark by adding chili to some pasta dishes and grapes to others — with bad results.

I can't say anything about this specific restaurant, but this statement seems like it could just as easily be considered an opinion rather than treated as a fact.

Another consideration is that one leader may be highly skilled in a given trait while anther leader has a completely different core set of traits which force change to take place when there is a change of leadership. Changes in leadership style are typically changes that reflect the competency range of one leader compared to another.

Politics is especially filled with the sort of criticism that changes are being made "for the sake of change" so that someone can challenge if the change is meaningful, because there is no perceived value of that change to a person who disagrees with the change.

I don't know how this could even be quantified, but I disagree with the assumption that changes are typically made simply "for the sake of change".

Although I don't have any hard evidence, I think this is less true with Ruby on Rails, probably Python/Django as well. I just can't imagine that legacy Rails applications are going to be getting outsourced anytime soon. It will probably take another 15 years before Ruby even comes close to the widespread usage of PHP.

I haven't gotten very far with this issue in Ruby, however in PHP there is also a way to get around the lack of precision by treating numbers as strings and then using additional libraries to perform the necessary calculations. The ability to do this in a clear and concise manner and be absolutely certain that everything is adding up properly is not easy.

From my perspective, the fact that these calculations do not perform correctly right out of the box using dynamic languages is the problem, and adding additional libraries is not the solution.

Although I don't work with COBOL, I do work at a financial services company and we have a lot of old software that we are not going to replace with Ruby, PHP, or any other dynamic language because the precision and accuracy of decimals and floats in dynamic languages is inadequate. I'm really surprised that the precision issue gets ignored at the native numeric level within dynamic languages.

The idea that each feature in a software package costs $50 to develop is, of course, nonsense.

But... I've worked for a couple of companies that don't allow their developers (such as myself) to talk directly to their clients because any feature requests that come up in those discussions throw off project management planning and projected timelines. When you are trying to convince management that their developers should be working on XYZ feature, it is a much different world than an individual requesting a feature in such a way that it is an insult to the software developer.

Also, I don't know that my pride has ever been hurt by a feature request, but maybe that is because I'm used to working in a corporate environment and my core development strategy is not always "to make great software that delights people".

Can you back up this assertion? Since one person in this topic already said that the 15 inch model does have 8bit and you just say that it doesn't, how am I supposed to believe you?

I agree that the karma points derived from article posting is essentially a lot of nonsense. I remember once finding an article on slashdot in the middle of the night about java being rumored to be open sourced before it actually happened. I quickly posted it to reddit since I had not already seen the article there, and within the next day I obtained about 80 karma points from posting that one article. The news article would have ended up on reddit regardless of if I posted it, but because I was lucky enough to see the article first among reddit readers, I got a lot of karma points.

I doubt that anyone has ever gotten 80 karma points from writing a single comment, but it is difficult to use comments alone as a ranking system since there are a lot of people who just read articles and will ignore any additional commentary.

There is also a flip side to "must know X language" which are job posts that is in search of applicants who must have 2+ years of Scrum and Pair Programming experience. I've found that this is especially common within Ruby on Rails job posts. Eventually I will get around to trying to practice those techniques on my own, but I don't see how not having those skills disqualifies me from being a potential candidate. I've also been flat out rejected as an applicant for not having experience working on a public facing website, but oh well. I will just have to get around to build a massive public facing website on my own too.

A friend of mine told me that she had basically used one well written generic paper to get though almost all of the essays required in college because the subject of her paper was so generic and applicable to the field she was studying (psychology). If TurnItIn were to "catch" someone for re-using their own work, I would say that TurnItIn is violating the fair use of the student because it is penalizing the student for being able to re-use previous drafts that were written by the student.

I'm sure teachers don't condone the idea of students re-using previously submitted work from another class, but I think that it is a legitimate right and just shows how ignorant some teachers are who accept papers on generic subjects.

There are probably other specific places where TurnItIn could arguably be abusive of ownership beyond fair use, but there needs to be a specific context to the situation.

Someone should come up with a 3D text editor for next year's April fool's day. It would probably be fun to write some code in 3D for about the same amount of time that it would be fun to visit websites in 3D (one day).

I wonder if Twitter would have to re-write all their Ruby on Rails code into Java since Ruby is not a supported language at Google.

It would be nice if Amazon released a version of the Kindle software to be used on an actual computer.

Is there some sort of hidden assumption that people will never read an entire book on their computer, only on a portable device? Maybe I am just biased against the idea that no one reads a book on their computer since I do it all the time with technical books that can be purchased in pdf format.

A Kindle software app would open up (as in make available, not DRM free) a lot of books from publishers that do not have any sort of digital download of their books.

Is this really something of interest to Hacker News? It sounds more like political flamebait to me.

I worked for a company that has an open-plan office and the work environment did not do anything to improve in-person communication between developers. I'm sure that it is possible for an open-plan office to be a positive thing, but by itself there is no added benefit. The reason that having an open-plan office made no difference was because everyone communicated via IRC. I would spend more time typing questions into IRC than I would spend talking to co-workers who were sitting right next to me with their headphones on. The fact that the company had an open-plan office did nothing to prevent IRC from being the main communication vehicle.

There were definitely positive things about IRC being the main communication tool, but it killed off any potential benefit that having an open-plan office would provide.

Its one thing to say 'rate my startup', but to say 'look how much I'm making' is something totally different.

I seriously don't see the point of advertising how much money I'm making off a given site. If someone else knows that putting together a site like RSSTalker will eventually bring in thousands of dollars annually with a minimum amount of maintenance, doesn't that increase the chance that my site is going to get cloned by someone else?

If I were to visit RSSTalker and not know whether or not the site was profitable, I would be less likely to take the time to consider cloning the site.