rlivsey

It doesn't even need to be a reset link, it could be a link with a unique ID which logs you into the site directly.

I'd have thought that would be even more convenient than telling the user their password, as all they have to do is click a link and they're good to go.

This is the same as any online gaming site.

I used to work for Victor Chandler [1] and there's basically a small number of companies who supply the games to all the different gaming sites. NetEnt [2] and Playtech [3] are the two which I can remember.

There are hundreds of games available, but they are all basically the same with different skins. The spike in traffic when a new game comes out always surprised me, people wanted to play the new SpiderMan game (or whatever) even though it's exactly the same as all the others, just with a different colour-scheme!

At the point where you start the game, the outcome is already determined, it's just a case of going through the motions until it informs the player. Whether that's scratching numbers off, watching a virtual horse-race etc...

It's heavily regulated though, much like fruit-machines/one-arm-bandits there is a percentage payout which needs to be satisfied, so it's no more a scam in that sense than buying physical scratch cards which they have to ensure a certain percent win each of the prize levels.

[1] - http://www.victorchandler.com/

[2] - http://www.netent.com/

[3] - http://playtech.com/

For us it's just another thing that's not our core competency which we're happy to have outsourced so that other people worry about security/maintenance etc... Similar rationale for using Spreedly [1] for subscription billing.

In the future it may be the case that we move that in house, but right now it's working out really well.

We're using PostMark [2] which amounts to $1.50 per 1000 emails, which is cheap enough for our uses. It's one less thing to worry about so we can focus on more important tasks such as finishing the v2 we're about to launch!

  [1] - http://spreedly.com/
  [2] - http://postmarkapp.com

Ah fair point, I don't use Chromium so hadn't noticed whether or not the effect was present.

The page itself confused me though as I thought the inline images were meant to be working demos and they did nothing for me until I went to the demo page itself.

[edit] fixed typo

Graceful degradation doesn't just mean "works without JavaScript".

This demo doesn't let you link to (or bookmark) a page or open questions in new tabs. For an app like Gmail that probably doesn't matter, but for something like this I'd say it's pretty crucial functionality to be missing.

Progressive enhancement where you add JS to improve the experience is a much better approach. That way you get all the basic functionality for free instead of trying to retrofit it onto the ajaxy app.

Now that you can manipulate the address bar with pushState [1] you can even make these enhancements completely transparent.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Manipulating_the_browse...

It doesn't work for me on the article page itself, but it you view the demo (link at the bottom of the article) then you can see it working.

We've not put it into production yet (it's coming in the new version) but are putting it through its paces in staging and it's handling things well so are confident it's ready for our usage.

There are people on the mailing list which are using it for some fairly hefty things.

Usual case of YMMV and as with anything it's worth taking a bit of time to try out the various options and see how they stack up for your usage. A good thing about ES is that it's so quick and easy to get running that trying it out and doing some benchmarking is pretty trivial.

We're using ElasticSearch [1] and finding it really nice to work with.

It's basically Lucene with a nice JSON/RESTful interface and distributed out of the box.

Unlike most other Lucene based systems that I've played with it allows you to get started without having to define your schema upfront, so you can just chuck data at it and worry about field types later.

It's under constant development and the community is really helpful.

[1] - http://www.elasticsearch.com/

He addresses that in the paragraph before:

  My first attempt at plotting the data involved plotting 
  very transparent lines. Unfortunately there was just too
  much data to get a meaningful plot — even at very low 
  opacity, there were enough lines to make the entire 
  image just a bright blob.

In this case I'd opt for "clean" as a better word for what you're trying to describe.

I'd have thought everyone understands what a clean URL is without bringing across all the extra baggage/meaning of calling it RESTful.

Pizza deliveries are all basically that last-mile, you're not normally ordering a pizza from another city/country.

That means the company has lots of individual restaurants with their own delivery operations (guys on bikes) who handle that last mile on an individual basis, or maybe doing a couple of pizzas at a time.

If you've ordered a pizza, then you're also pretty much guaranteed to be at home. There's not much point leaving a note saying your pizza was taken back to the depot or left with your neighbour!

It's a difficult one because our decisions & mistakes made earlier in our lives are what make us who we are today.

It's a cliché, but mistakes are an opportunity to learn, that means I've had a hell of a lot of learning experiences!

If anything, the only things worth regretting are mistakes that you've repeated - because they could be avoidable?

I dropped out of dental school in order to pursue a computer-science degree instead. Everyone around me told me I should have done the comp-sci degree in the first place, with hind-sight that's obvious and technically I 'lost' a year. But that one year of studying for dentistry and having to make the major decision to drop-out was fantastic experience.

They did a similar thing to me the other week. Their idea of a safe place was on my doorstep, in plain view of the street. Needless to say it wasn't there when I looked.

As others have mentioned, the really annoying thing here was that I was working from home at the time and they didn't ring the bell. Surely it's less effort to ring the doorbell than it is to write out a card?

White Label Dating [1] is one (aptly named) white-label package that I know of.

[1] - http://www.whitelabeldating.com/

It's not the usual case of extra fluff in the URL causing the uniqueness check to fail, they are significantly different and only following the link would show them as the same thing.

Looks like this one is the canonical URL vs the one I posted previously, or he's updated his blog software and the URLs have changed. I would have thought I'd have noticed the redirect.

The uniqueness checker could follow links & redirects to check for duplicates, or maybe simply a note on the submission page along the lines of:

  please search Google for 'site:news.ycombinator.com "article title"' 
  to make sure this hasn't already been posted.

In a previous life I worked at a company [1] doing things similar to this [2]. It was great to see it put to use in the 7/7 London bombings, and it certainly helped save a few lives over the years.

When I left a couple of years ago we were putting the finishing touches to a new version which was much improved, but it looks like that never launched.

[1] http://citysafe.org

[2] http://communitysafe.gov.uk/

If it's anything like Fluid.app [1] on the Mac then I'm a big fan.

I have numerous web-apps setup as dedicated applications using Fluid and find it much nicer than having them as tabs in the same browser, or in their own browser windows. It means I can launch them with Spotlight easily, they have their own icon in the dock and start up without the address-bar or any other chrome.

At any one time I'd say around 75% of the apps I'm running are Fluid.app instances.

[1] http://fluidapp.com/

I've just measured all my pairs of 34" jeans and they are consistently 36". I only buy Paul Smith these days because I've come to know that they will fit me well without having to shop around.

Last time I was measured for a suit I came out at almost exactly 34", but then the fitting for suit trousers is much more snug than those for jeans. I wear a belt with my jeans whereas I'd expect trousers to hold themselves up.

So on that basis, I'm not too surprised that jeans made to fit a 34" waist are an inch or two larger, but more than that seems a little crazy.

Yep, the equivalent would probably be something along the lines of:

    if baz > 10
      func = :foo
    else
      func = :bar
    end

    result = self.send(func)

"File -> Make a copy..." from the toolbar should do the trick

I think it's "What You See Is What You Get When You Leave Everything Alone For Two Seconds"

Radiolab also featured a story about them last year: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/02

As an aside, I think Radiolab is one of the best podcasts out there and it's certainly worth a listen if you've never heard it before.

I've never run into this myself (BSc Comp Sci, MSc Management), but that might be because most jobs I've had have come through word of mouth / networking. Plus, once you've got a bit of a career history, your education doesn't matter much compared to your experience.

I've spoken to plenty of friends/employers who don't care about degrees at all, but not many who would actively count that against applicants.

As other people have said, it most likely depends on the kind of jobs you're applying for. Being massively over-qualified for the position you're going for can certainly act against you as you're more likely to get bored and move on.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy [1] explores the colonisation of Mars and the political and societal issues that come from that.

Well worth a read if you haven't already.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

That's what I do, I bought myself a trimmer and give myself a #3 buzz-cut about once a month. I haven't been to a salon in ~4 years now so have more than paid for the trimmers.

I still use shampoo & conditioner though, seems to be better for the scalp but I expect that it's partially down to habit.

It helps that the style suits me otherwise I wouldn't do it.

I think that's Jeremy Bentham and the Panopticon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

It makes sure that it returns a boolean value as opposed to something truthy/falsy which could lead to oddness if you try and directly compare it with a boolean value.

According to the spec, media.canPlayType returns either "", "maybe" or "probably". An empty string "" is falsy in Javascript and a non-empty string is truthy, but if you try and compare them directly with booleans then you can get some odd behaviour:

  if ("yes"){ // true }
  if ("yes" == true){ // false }
  if ("yes" === true){ // false }

  if (""){ // false }
  if ("" == false){ // true }
  if ("" === false){ // false }

I personally prefer to make sure that any function which you're expecting the return value to be used as a boolean actually returns a boolean value. I know there are many people out there with a dislike of !! though.

When I was at school I seem to remember that we weren't allowed to use computers for most homework in order to encourage developing handwriting skills etc...

Not that it helped, my handwriting is atrocious! That's mainly because in the past 10 years or so I've hardly written a thing which wasn't meant to be read by anyone other than myself.

Indeed, this works fine for pages which just contain CSS for that specific page but I'm not sure how often that actually occurs in the wild. And if you've got just a one page site then surely managing the CSS for that isn't a big issue?

For most of the sites I've worked on, I bundle up the CSS into a main stylesheet and then often one specific stylesheet per-section. If this could spider the whole site and generate a report on that then it would certainly be more useful.

We got similar uniques on MinuteBase when that was featured - 4,000 visits on the first day and 2,000 for the next 2 days until it dropped off the front page.