ryanto

I absolutely understand the need to choose good teachers over bad teachers. However, how much will the teachers' salary play into the selection process? I would imagine a teacher with 20 years experience gets paid quite more than a teacher with five years experience. Serious question, does salary go into consideration when rehiring or is it solely based on teaching skill?

I am currently working on a recipe project: http://www.recipecan.com/

The goal of this site is to get people to make food and then blog about the recipe, ingredients, taste, etc. If there are any cooks out there that wish to join let me know and I will fire you an invite. I'd love to get some 'hacker' recipes up there.

might want to remove that ip, regardless of if it is yc or not.

Do you realize that when your only goal is to gain karma points the overall quality of HN suffers, thus decreasing the value of each karma point?

All of your posts are just tech/startup gossip. Kinda boring, no?

This article is a joke, it's something I would expect to find on some tech/news gossip website. Is this what FSF has become?

> so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers.

I would think just about any popular web site would be a gold mine for such information. It has nothing to do with Facebook. Doesn't this sentence hold true if we replace Facebook with Google? This seems like a tinfoil/scare everyone into believing Facebook is evil and out to get you.

> and then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him. In some cases he does not — witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss.

Comeon, examples/proof please. Is Facebook blocking URLs to competition or child porn sites? There is a pretty big difference here.

I would think that the FSF should be on Facebook, trying to spread their message, gaining support, and discovering new users. They have an interesting problem, a lot of support, and some very big challenges ahead of them... and yet they spend time publishing articles like this and making fancy dislike buttons. FSF you should be ashamed.

I wrote a webapp to handle your contact form.

http://www.strikeform.com/

You just copy and paste a few lines of javascript onto your page and it generates a contact form, handles validation, and e-mail delivery. It's very basic, it asks for Name, E-mail, and Message. If anyone wants more features/fields added just let me know.

The reason I wrote this was because I got sick of having to make a contact us page for every site I was building, but I felt that having a contact us page is pretty important.

it looks like ec2 is messed up tonight. i am guessing reddit is trying to stay above water until things get sorted out.

The cost of writing 'Hello' in an email is very minimal, the cost of reading one of these greeting is also very minimal.

The cost of being perceived as unfriendly, too-business-like, and demanding is just so high. It's not worth the risk.

PS: I don't care either way, but I have heard multiple people comment on how they don't like doing business with person xyz because their emails are extremely cold and unfriendly. Because of this I have alway add a nice greeting and a friendly closing. The middle is all business/meat, but padding it with some friendly talk can really help.

seo matters - its hard to create an argument against that.

certain seo practices, generally promoted by the firms claiming to get you to the #1 spot in google, are snake oil.

> In order to ensure a good experience for users and advertisers, publishers participating in the AdSense program may not:

> Encourage users to click the Google ads using phrases such as "click the ads", "support us", "visit these links" or other similar language.

from: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...

I agree with you though, not everything is entirely clear. There is no way Google can make a statement for every case that can possibly happen. They come up with these general rules followed by a 'we can do whatever we want' catch all.

I feel like I am defending Google way too much. I think the could have handled it a lot better, that said - I do think the end result was correct and I am not ready to scream google is evil like most people here seem to be doing.

> Where was he deceiving or misrepresenting the situation?

He is deceiving the advertisers. They are paying for people interested in the ad, thats not what they are getting.

> The fact is that there is no tractable way for Google to separate people who are interested in supporting an ad-driven business from those who really are creating false ad traffic for financial gain.

Correct, but we can look at the average CTRs of other sites/blogs that focus on the same subject. That should give us a good understand of foul play (yes, of course there will be some false positives).

Someone got this working with ruby (rails). There's a gem/plugin out there that gets the file uploading/system working (I believe it relies somewhat on paperclip,etc). Sorry for being so vague, but I'm sure Google will turn up something.

No, but its getting very close to the gray area/fine line. If you are encouraging the user to click your link for some reason other than him being interested in the product - then it is click fraud.

Example of click fraud: I get paid when users click my ads. The more money this website makes the less time I have to spend working hourly at Starbucks. Less time at Starbucks means more time working on my website, writing content, and making videos.

Btw, he says he was doing this in his blog post.

> As part of the deal, and as a way of involving the sailors, I tell them about the revenue for the project which all comes from the website. The more the website earns the more sailing I can do, the more films they see.

> Oh yes, I was also running little blocks of adverts provided by Adsense and, yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers – all of whom were interested in selling stuff to sailors.

So basically, I am paying for his boat project. People are clicking the ads in order to see his project continue, not because they are interested in the product. Sure, the correlation between users clicking the ads and users interested in the product is going to be a lot closer to 1 than -1. However, that does not justify what is going on... at the end of the day users are clicking the ads so he gets more money, not because they are _absolutely_ interested in the product.

I really don't know what else to say about this. Google makes it pretty clear that you cannot do this. Just because he didn't read the T&Cs and just because he is doing videos isn't going to give him a free pass.

I think google handled the situation poorly. They should pay him some amount, like the expected CTR for the ads that were displayed on his site. As far as Google never doing business with him, I think thats fine and correct... think of the big picture here.

I don't get why everyone is so upset at Google here? The guy admits to committing click fraud and then gets shut down. As someone who spends a bit of money on adwords I am pretty happy to see Google is active in enforcing these policies.

I wouldn't worry about this too much. Google does a good job when it comes to spotting the difference between you and these guys.

As far as serving junk content to that IP, its a waste of time. As your blog gets more popular you'll start getting more and more people ripping your content. The time you spend trying to beat these guys is better used elsewhere.

My advice, get a few high quality links going to your domain, this will come naturally over time. It will really let the search engines know which domain is the authority and which domains are just stealing content.

I've been using the nexus s for a few days and I enjoy it. The biggest problem I have is the lack of notifications. No blinking leds or anything.

Does anyone have any experience selling wepapps? Something that sits on a database, memcache, solr, etc? I've got a few sites that use various frameworks/technologies that were fun projects that I no longer maintain. I've always thought about selling them, but have always hesitated due to the fear of having to spend time supporting them.

Are buyers generally technical? Could I just say, you get a huge performance boost when you turn on memcache, and they'll know what I mean?

Do they expect me to host the application, or do they want the code/database/domain all transfered over to them? If transfer, do they expect help setting it up?

Flippa has always perked my interest, but every time I look at it I just see a bunch of wordpress blogs that auto generate content. I'd love to hear some stories that involve apps more sophisticated than content blogs.

Platform as a service architecture is so cheap these days that you can pretty much drop that sys-admin time down to 0-1% with very minimal cost.

there is a price point where we will pretty much take just about any job. if this job hits your price point, take it.

also, not everyone on HN has glamorous jobs. you gotta start somewhere.

In general, any problem you are having has existed before. Any issues you've had during development other programmers have had as well. This is especially true for any popular language/framework/design problem. The programmers that have had these problems before you will often blog about it, open issue tickets somewhere, or be vocal on the mailing lists. Google should be able to answer just about any issue you are having, since it already exists on the web somewhere. If the search results are slim then chances are you are doing it wrong or not thinking about the problem correctly.

Of course you may discover a bug or some edge case. In that case feel free to go out and post about. However, if this is happening once a day, or even once a week, you are most likely doing it wrong.

Just remember - other people have been in this spot before, what did they do to fix it?

This seems like a great way to request a new feature just because it gets you talking about it.

You are going to tell your team, friends, and other users this story. Just by telling them about this a-hole customer is immediately going to bring the feature into the conversation. What if everyone you told snaps back with 'Well, he may be a dick, but thats a great feature' or 'That feature sure is stupid!'. This feature request just got more attention than any of your previous users requests.

The best feedback I get is from my asshole customers. They are vocal and upset. Something didn't go their way and they are unhappy. If I can fix that I get more happy customers.

Also, my polite customers are generally too happy/polite. Its hard to get feedback when they love your product. They'll put in pretty good feature requests and talking to them is always easy. It makes me feel really good when people love my product, but its really hard for them to tell you how much feature xyz sucks. Generally, we have to look at the logs to see what people are using/not using when it comes to happy/fanboy customers.

Of course, it is not ok to act like a dickhead. Being well respected is usually the best way to get things done.

fwiw, i cant go to "seqcentral.com" without my browser throwing a fit (ssl cert error).

doesn't really matter - since all of these services allow you to change the e-mail addresss in the future. i'd use whatever is most convenient, probably a general catchall @yourdomain.com

most private registrations will auto forward emails to the actual owner. try emailing the address the comes up in the whois.

example: domain.com@private-register.com will forward to the actual owner.

pick the language that will get results faster. that sounds like java.

at this point, future hires do not matter. do not worry about them.

Yup, the service I use is strongvpn.com. Had them for about a year, no complaints.

http://docs.heroku.com/ - I am sure you have seen this, but there is a ton of good info here.

looks very nice.

1) When browsing lists I like the spacing and big font, but I would also like to see all books without having to scroll. Like an easy way to take the list in.

2) Add more ways to login, maybe including your own system.

3) This might be a cheesy idea, but is there anyway you can theme book lists based on their topic/category. For some reason I think the layout of scifi fiction list could/should be different than a list of Perl books. Btw, when I say theme I just mean general layout stuff, not like MySpace animated gif theme.

When most people claim that language X is "not cool" it's a defense mechanism. They do not know or have no interest in learning X, so it becomes worthless and uncool to them.

Spend more time focusing on theory and less on stack.

As for stack advice, pick what you want to do.