saturdayplace

If the OP is looking for a page turner, then Stephenson's Snow Crash is another great recommendation. Anathem was slower to me, and Reamde was good. But if I was to pick up Stephenson's stuff again I go to Snow Crash, then Cryptonomicon as my one, two.

Catch 22 is a fantastic read. I don't think I've read anything else where everything in the book is such a great illustration of its main theme. Plus, it's just plain entertaining.

Contact by Carl Sagan. I first read it as an adult and it took my breath away. The movie was a fair adaptation.

Also, I like to read Ender's Game once a year or so.

Agreeing with other people in here: <big company site> cost <big company> more money and time than your client is paying. It's fair to tell him so. Possibly he'll agree and re-negotiate your rate up, but I doubt it. This sounds like one of patio11's pathological customers, whom you're better off without. I'm not sure what that does to your Elance reputation though.

Now, I don't have any Elance experience so take the following with grain of salt. If you're still interested in trying to source clients there, you might try raising your rate to something you'd prefer. In fact, raise your rates to something that seems outrageous to you. If you're competent at all you're probably undercharging. The higher rate will attract a different breed of client who won't balk so long as you have a portfolio of work you can point at as an example of what you're capable of.

All this advise is obviously colored by my current situation. I've got a great day job, but I moonlight occasionally. I bid much higher rates than most people who come to me (by word of mouth) are expecting. Because I value my free time, I bid high enough on projects that if the prospect actually engages me I won't regret losing the free time. And if they walk away, hey, more time for me to work on my own stuff.

A while back I tried brainstorming a bunch of revision control for <x>'s. I figured there were plenty of industries outside of programming that could use a tailor-made versioning system. Later on, I ran across one of them at https://layervault.com/ which is for graphic designers, which seemed (to me at least) to prove that the more general concept has legs.

And if you're failing to come up with any unique ideas for an app on your own, as a learning experience there's no shame in copying something else. It seems like many web developers try their hand at building their own blogging platform. Such an exercise should introduce you to a lot of the fundamentals of how a web application is put together. Or, pick a popular web app (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr), and try to replicate some of its features. Your app won't even come close to nailing down the whole set, and the things you implement will likely be buggy and inefficient versions of their professional counterparts, but if the point is just to learn I don't see why copying is a bad way to start. Many beginning artists learn technique by copying too. [citation needed (:]

Would you perhaps be willing to contribute to the project in order to improve its explanations?

> You're doing that, right? Keeping track of how well your hiring process predicts performance?

I've read http://matasano.com/careers/ a couple of times (because perhaps sometime I'll be interested in applying, or perhaps because I may end up stealing bits of it) and I think you guys are on the right track. I'd be interested to read about your experiences refining that process and what sorts of things you've learned along the way.

> I noticed that the people who normally book low rate devs are the ones you REALLY don't want to deal with.

This sentiment ought to be highlighted. It gets repeated often enough on HN that some people here get sick of hearing it (search for patio11's "pathological customers/clients"). But there are always people who haven't encountered this idea, so I think it bears repeating: People looking for a basement bargain deal bring all kinds of other expectations that will markedly impact your patience/time. This has the effect of eating up any value you may have gotten out of charging a low rate to begin with.

To be clear, I believe Amazon's "I filled up my cart, let's check out now" re-authentication is a protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery. The point being, an attacker couldn't just send you a link, have you click on it, and you've now just accidentally purchased $3000 worth of questionably viable prescription medication.

For a while, inspired by the Django Book, I toyed with the idea of doing something similar for screenplays and building a community where people could offer feedback on those or other creative writing endeavors. It ended up looking like I'd have to implement it myself, but if you're building a web application already then this feature alone shouldn't add too much to your dev time.

My naive plan was just to give each comment-able item (eg. a paragraph) a specific ID, and having a many-to-one relationship with comments to paragraphs. I never followed through, so I'm not sure what pitfalls you'd likely encounter doing it that way.

And really, that's the entire point: as a developer your effectiveness in smaller time increments is usually limited. Context switching has a cognitive cost that's generally paid in larger time chunks, so it makes sense to set your client expectations in those terms.

And regardless of the time it takes you to deliver something, they should be paying you in terms of the value they get from it.

I'm avoiding the whole discussion of about ICANN's money grubbing here, in favor of how a TLD operator could become the money grubber instead/as well.

While I can see _some_ value in owning a brand-name TLD like .patagonia or .nike, I always thought the real value would be in owning something more generic, like .travel (which I know already exists) or .shoes. Then you can squat all you want on the names like patagonia.travel or nike.shoes and make a killing when all the brands associated with your generic niche want a little piece of your land.

At the beginning of a mortgage, the overwhelming majority of your payment will be interest; a very small slice is applied to the principal. Over the term of the loan, those small cuts whittle away the principal owed, which in turn lowers the amount of interested charged each payment (a percentage of the principal owed), until at the end of the mortgage your payment is mostly principal.

If you do the math, a typical 30-year mortgage will cost you twice the actual cost of paying cash for a home, so roughly 50% of your payment actually gets converted into equity, assuming your home value was static over the term. This is why people often advise new homeowners to make an extra principal-only payment as often as possible at the beginning of the loan: to cut down the eventual amount of interest you'll end up paying.

That's what I've done with my mortgage. I've been lucky to be in a position to make frequent principal-only payments and should be able to cut a 30-year mortgage to 15-ish or so, saving a metric grundle of cash in the process. Given the nature of the conversation happening around this thread, I suppose I should state my reasons for trading away job-seeking flexibility: I LOVE that eventually, I'll have a roof and four walls independent of my employment situation.

I acknowledge the performance issues. I was responding, however, to a comment about what these make the site look like.

So far, so good. I got my first-ever cell phone a couple weeks ago and am doing this exact thing: Nexus 4 + T-Mobile pre-paid plan. I'm on the $60/month plan on the page linked above by whichdan, but will probably drop to $30, because I just don't use many talk minutes. So far, I don't have complaints with the service.

*edit DON'T have complaints. Accidentally an important word.

All it'd take to make most of these usable is finessing the colors a bit so they don't jump off the page like they do here. It's definitely possible to make the patterns more subtle while retaining the shape effects. I viewed the page as a nifty demonstration of CSS-based patterns. Actually implementing the appropriate colors with these is left as an exercise for the reader.

You might also like the Fiddler in the Subway, a collection of articles by Gene Weingarten

Graphic design went through this a while back: "Woe! Our industry is flooded with people who've no aptitude." Desktop publishing resulted in a metric crapton of nasty designs for a while. But subsequently we've seen a Cambrian explosion of great looking stuff. The same thing is happening with video production right now. YouTube is overfilled with stuff no one wants to watch but already we're seeing innovative stuff come out as people with access to previously unavailable tools learn how to use them effectively.

For a while this probably means that our code repos might be filled with nasty stuff, but I'm convinced we'll be better off for it in the long run.

it surprised me when I realized most people don't do this.that's what my parents to growing up in that's what my wife and I do now. I only recently realized that most people don't put so much planning into their menus.

Thank you for this link. As someone just getting started in web app security this was eye-opening.

It's fiction, but I recommend "The Virtues of War" by Steven Pressfield. It's a novel (based on history, but certainly dramatized) about Alexander's march to the East.

A lot of other things can be an obstacle to relocating: wanting to have family close by, having put roots into a community you love. There are definitely tradeoffs to owning a home, but I've decided for me there's more upside than down.

I'm around halfway through the mortgage on my place and relish the thought that once it's paid, even if I eventually find myself between a rock and a financial hard place I'll have four walls and a roof and no obligation to anyone for them. I'll have a good 30 years (give or take) of earning potential left in me by that point which means I'll have plenty of disposable income on top of what I've been squirreling away all along for a retirement. Yeah, I've had to fix leaky pipes (and cursed the time spent doing it) but overall I find comfort in the thought that if current trends continue, I'll have a place to park FOREVER.

I'd love to believe that this data falls underneath the "Facts are not copyrightable" decision: http://chart.copyrightdata.com/c16B.html

I'd always assumed that the product you'd build with one of these frameworks would live behind some sort of authentication such that SEO wouldn't really be an issue because the bots wouldn't see it. Your marketing site would be driven by a separate CMS.

I'm not surprised to hear that the percentage of external activity is going up. Do you have a good handle on what the average ratio is nowadays?

As much as we talk about securing your systems, having someone in-house go rogue like this is a MUCH higher risk to your data than having someone break in. Internal unrest (or stupidity) will probably bite you harder than crackers will.

> Does the HSTS list store the signature?

It doesn't matter. The ONLY thing HSTS does is tell the browser to make future requests over HTTPS. If an HSTS site switches to a self-signed cert between my visits, the browser will still get warn me, because the new cert is suspicious.

A couple years ago, the Django Advent had a nifty JS enhancement for footnotes. I thought it worked so well I stole it for a personal project of mine. I would've linked to the original but they're now offline, so if you'll pardon the personal plug you can see it in action at http://sonsofterra.com/

I'd recently come to the same conclusion that programming is a fantastic secondary skill. Having some other domain expertise - combined with the ability to make your own tools - seems to be the best way to find problems that people are willing to pay money to solve.