racbart

You did not just changed “some policy”. You had the contract and tried to quietly change rules in the middle. If you really, really had to change rules for existing customers, you should offer them either accepting new rules or canceling their contracts and receiving their money back.

I really like the idea of solar updraft tower, where air moves the other way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower

It's disadvantage is that it requires much more land, but it doesn't require water on the other hand. As someone noticed, the water-powered downdraft version requires pumping water from 46 miles away and then 2000+ ft up.

I disagree. I mean, you put the line at a wrong place.

So you say we shouldn't benefit from competitor's outages, but we can benefit from their failures of different types? Because every time you claim that you do something better than competition, it's simply you trying to benefit from their failure to do this thing right.

I think the line should be a bit further than you say. Benefiting from someone's downtime or any other kind of failure is perfectly fine, unless that downtime/failure wasn't easily avoidable. If the downtime/failure is because the company lack of professionalism then you should go and benefit from it. If their downtime is because they are hosting servers in their own office, under CTO's desk, and cleaning lady disconnected the cable, shame on them.

That said, this wasn't the case. DDoS isn't something anyone can easily protect from and because of that you shouldn't try to benefit from it. If you do, you basically lie to your customers by making impression that you could avoid such outage.

For me it's not only shaking legs behind a desk. It's also walking in circles when talking on the phone. It's also doing something with my hands when I'm not at the computer (preferably with some item like pen or phone or anything what's nearby).

I consider it as a soft version of light ADHD, but I doubt it has anything to do with my profession. It might be the other way around - I chose a profession where I create new things because of that trait (which might also be connected to me being easily exited about new things).

I believe that they (government) are just in a business where it's better to overclasify 100 documents than underclasify one.

Think of it from web development perspective. Years ago SSL were used only for financial transactions, then for e-commerce transactions. Nowadays it's considered a good practice to use it anywhere you transfer any user data or session. Isn't that our industry's equivalent of their over-classification routine? I think they basically do the same what we do with SSL - they apply their security layer to all content produced by all their users. It's exactly what we do with our security layers in software development.

Great product that solves a little but important problem the right way and hassle-free!

Plus, I really like the Series T Financing idea (see footer link).

Would that even be legal in the EU? “Upscale furniture store Restoration Hardware said that it had sent "your name, address and what you purchased" to seven other companies, including a data "cooperative" that allows retailers to pool data about customer transactions”

This is very nice but I have some suggestions to improve:

Navigation: The “next” link is very small and it's in different place on every step. A fixed navigation and/or bigger link would be nice.

Also, showing me that it's “Step 3” is useless to me - I can count myself and even if I couldn't, I don't really care how many steps I've already seen. I'm more interested in how many more there are.

There should also be automatic scrolling so that I could actually see the next highlighted area. If you already do the scrolling, remember to scroll in a way that guarantees to show whole area, not only top line.

Thanks for the great work, I think I might use it in my next projet!

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Great minds think alike, right? (edit: formatting)

I don't know sendgrid service details but if they can track email clicks, then preserving utm variables might actually be good.

You get number of email clicks from separate metric, plus you get total reach from Google Analytics - so that you know total impact of your mailing (or any other channel you're tracking), including reshares.

It looks nice but I still prefer http://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/ for two reasons:

They have more upcoming shows, so I can follow some promising shows when I hear about them and they'll show in my calendar half year later when they start running. I have four upcoming shows on pogdesign that weren't found here.

I selected my time zone when signing up, only to be disappointed that all dates and times in the calendar are still in the US time. I live in Europe so the difference usually means it's already next day here when the shows are aired. pogdesign can handle that.

Other than that, this looks pretty neat. Recommended shows seems well-chosen but I'd like to have “not interested” button so that the show would be hidden and another one would jump in.

Keep up the good work and fix the problems mentioned above and I'll switch!

That what practical tests are for. Throw a problem to solve, leave the programmer for an hour and see what he'll produce, while having normal access to the online world.

But you don't want to check encyclopedic knowledge during interview talk. You want to check how well he understands what he's doing, what is his approach to problems, what kind of problems did he solve in the past and how he did it, and lot of other things that don't require the only one correct answer (and cannot even be answered by one).

It's awesome that it can make my bag to talk to me, but I'd love to know what language will she talk.

There's zero information about how the device works. Will it talk to me online while my bag is miles away after someone steal it and drive away (I doubt)? Or is it simply low energy Bluetooth 4? Will it only tell me “your bag is within 200 meters” or will it exactly show me direction?

First make your website talk to me, then promise me talking bags.

Evolve or die. I am the “old school developer” but that didn't stop me from staying up to date with technologies and trends. DIY developers are good to some point. You will never build anything large or build efficiently if you don't understand that not only DRY has value, but DRO as well (Don't Repeat Others' work).

Nobody blames the “old school developers” for not building their own computers like probably the “very old school developers” did. Computers are taken for granted and are obvious tools of the trade. Well, today frameworks and API are that tools.

As for developers not understanding of how stuff really works - they were always there. There were always people whose skills were limited to installing PHP-Nuke or osCommerce, adding some modules and changing frontend code. Don't confuse them with software developers.

YC doesn't control Dropbox. Whatever trust you have in a minor shareholder, it shouldn't translate to trust for the company.

There are other reasons as well: potential vulnerabilities in their software, malicious/crazy/corrupted employees, etc. Healthy need-to-know rule is enough to decide that if there's no reason your cloud provider should have access to your data, he shouldn't have it.

You could do that if there is a per-file key. But you'd need some client software to store and manage keys for individual files for easy exporting urls including these keys, and I read that MEGA is managed only via web (at least now).

SEEKING WORK - Remote with up to 50% travel (I'm based in Europe, but can work EST working hours).

I am a full web stack engineer with 12 years professional experience. I recently worked as CTO & Product Director at a small startup. Previously, I worked as Lead Software Developer at a mid-size company (sold for 9 digits at that time). I am happy with similar position as my last one or with 100% hands-on technical role as senior software developer.

I have lot of experience with various projects. I worked on web applications, enterprise intranet software, social websites, and so on. I am great in both solving little but tough problems and designing and implementing architectures using physical and cloud based servers, SQL and NoSQL databases, integrating various APIs, architecting applications to work under significant load and ensuring following patterns and best practices. My only drawback is that most of my backend experience is in PHP which is not that popular among HNers these days. But I learn quick and I'm always hungry for new experiences and knowledge. I have lot of experience in leading and coaching small teams, including remote/distributed teams, and leading projects.

In the last three years I started working on UX and interfaces, designing products, not only developing them. If you don't have resources for dedicated UX/UI person, I'm your go-to guy and can connect graphics designers with developers to build a great product.

I'm seeking remote or partly remote freelance or permanent work between 4h/wk and full-time. For full-time, I'm happy to travel worldwide as long as I spend at least 50% time at home.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/bartekr

Please contact me at bartus79 at gmail to discuss how I could help your company.

Do their job better and compete. Nobody in his right mind will object Apple for selling in their own stores. Why should car dealers have such unfair advantage to prohibit manufacturers to sell their goods?

There's a tiny chance that I use some throwaway email just to see what's next, knowing your original title. Without knowing that, there's no chance - I simply ignore a meaningless and containing zero information page which asks for my email.

So this could be a test only if people wouldn't know that, so the title change did you some good.

How about setting up your own VPN server on EC2 micro instance for $15/mo + bandwidth (or $127/y using reserved instance)?

If you want to compare, then imagine that you're in the middle of the interview and the interviewer suddenly tells you “get lost, here's the elevator”.

Saying “thanks but no, thanks” after the interview without telling the reason if perfectly fine for both a company and an interviewee.

The fact that you leave early is not rude, but the way you do it might be. He should find the lead developer (or whoever was in the lead of interviewing him) and tell him that he feels he won't fit into the culture, thank him for the interview and then leave.

Leaving without a word is in fact rude (“I'm done, show me the elevator” doesn't count, especially if lead developer had to jump the elevator to ask what's wrong and why he's leaving).

The iPad is already more than ready for general-purpose computing, which is leisure web browsing, purchasing stuff online, writing a blog or using social media. The kind of stuff my mom does or my friends from outside IT industry do using their computers.

This post was about iPad being (almost) ready to be the primary computer in some professional tasks and this is worth noticing and mentioning.

I trully believe that one of the most important factors (beside genetics and luck) is staying intellectually active for your entire life and gaining new experiences, learning new things though your entire life (the curiosity mentioned in the article) - and superagers from the article confirm that theory. 83-year old who teaches other seniors about baseball history and travels? 85-year old doing two crosswords daily, reading a lot of books on Kindle and doing a train trek across Canada?

I can tell about most of people I've known for years that they are smarter than they were ten years ago. But I know people in their thirties who I considered somehow smart ten years ago and now they're much dumber. Perhaps it's coincidence that their only activities seem to be get up in the morning to do eight hours of not very complicated work and then watch TV for the rest of the day (the more stupid channel the better).

I wouldn't buy a car if I expected the company might be dead in six months. Who'll service my car then? This isn't a well-known and old brand with independent service centers. Did Elon Musk just told me not to buy their cars? Thanks for the tip.

This is one of the reasons why I have different Apple ID for app purchases (with weaker password which I'm more comfortable to type over and over again when purchasing apps) and different for iCloud (which I need to type only once, configuring the device).

I saw many people buying their apps in public and the password input in iOS isn't really secure from bystanders. As a Gizmodo reporter he probably went to dozens of events where he was pitched to try someone's app and maybe even given App Store codes. If he used to download apps on such events that might be the source of his leaked password. Someone could simply see what password is he typing.

As long as Apple requires you to type the password with each purchase, it is wise to separate your sensitive data/services with the App Store credentials.

Facebook is so much younger than Google so it's a bit unfair to compare them this way. Facebook is still in such a crazy growth so they simply focus on their core business.

Google started launching their great non-search products (maps, mail) around 2004-2005 when it was at the same age as Facebook is today. And these products were or turned out to be supportive to their core search business as well. There were another couple of years before we've seen some great technologies from Google which weren't supposed to support their search business. So please, give Facebook couple more years before you judge.

Technical problems that Facebook solves in building and scaling their platform are enough challenging to require and attract the best minds in the industry. Let's see what these people will do when the dust settles a bit.

That said, I'm across the globe from the action and know nothing about these companies culture or attitude. But I still wouldn't judge Facebook yet.

I like that part too but it might be simply too strict. The point is to keep lifestyle changes reasonably small during that first year. Replace your old car worth $10k with a new $40k one (but not $200k) and don't buy many cars. Move from a $0.5M apartment to a $3M home (but not $15M) and preferably rent it for now, you will have better idea what you really like to buy after that year. There's no reason you couldn't get some reward for your hard work - but you need to make it small to don't fall into spending spree.

It is not about professional activities. I do not expect airline pilot to try new tricks fully loaded with passengers, but I appreciate Wrights brothers efforts to try to put the man in the air in the first place. If they were afraid to try, if hundreds of others who tried it before them and failed were afraid to try, we could be still dreaming about flying.

Bit it's not about innovation either. It's about pedestrian activities which one is afraid to take because of fear of failure. It could be going to play football with friends after 20 years of not playing. It could be trying to ride the first bike a kid got in front of his neighbours. It could be starting your own business. It could be anything one would like to do but his fear of failure stops him.

It's not about taking stupid risks (the airline pilot). It's about calculated risks and eliminating public failure as something one consider critically harmful. If your failure could cost you $1000 and some public exposure and it's the reason you won't try, but you would try if it'd cost you $2000 without public exposure - well, that's what this post is about. To learn to put less "value" on public exposure of your failures so that you'd stop considering it being such a big cost of potential failure.

One thing that I envy and I'm missing in my professional life is such a vibrant ecosystem and startup scene in where I live.

It's obvious that when you put two talented people together, they create value of 110% * (1 + 1). But when you mix so many of them, the multiplier starts hitting the sky. I've seen so many talents with great potential who already been kind of rockstars in their environments, but who could get so much better if they had such a great community in their city/country.