seltzered

interesting, my first impression is "hey, it's a linkblog!" rather than "hey, it's a delicious clone!". This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just my observation.

a few things I see that I'd kinda miss from delicious:

1) instead of seeing how many people are linking to something as a number, it instead has an "also shared by:" feature instead. I honestly like just seeing a number of how many people are sharing it more than seeing if a few random people are also sharing something. It also helps me judge whether someone linked a "big news item" or something they were personally digging for info on.

2) multiple tag filters - i.e. search multiple tags for my personal bookmarks. I don't use this much, but it's comfortable that it's there.

Is there a ACM club or something similar (robotics perhaps?) at your school? If not, it can't hurt to try to start one and attract others with the same problem as you. You never know how many others at your school may be feeling the same way, even if it's just a couple others.

disclaimer: if you do start a club, make sure it doesn't become too elitist or cultish, I felt really out of place because I didn't know anything at a robotics club before, but once the seniors left we restructured it to be more inviting to folks with a will to learn.

not sure why there's downvotes, maybe I worded the above too strongly.

He clearly mentions how he discusses how he routed around browser editing/DOM manipulation to Google, and then a similar approach was taken by Google later in their product.

I would say the problem is that you divulged technical details before getting a written "intent to acquire" from google.

While keeping the line of communication is important, it's also important to ensure it's worth your time.

most of my family is trying to be more minimal, so we stopped giving each other gifts years ago unless it was something important (baby, etc), or something they needed but was easier for someone else to find.

What I'd value personally: high quality outdoor clothing. I'd be happy if it was just a merino wool pair of socks. I'm tired of buying cheap jackets and want to finally invest in a good layering system for wintertime outdoor fun.

I like books/music, and things that get me out of the house.

What I hate: Best Buy gift certificates. I usually end up donating these to someone else.

I started off on an ee route. We used this textbook in our first circuit class: http://www.amazon.com/Electric-Circuits-8th-James-Nilsson/dp... .

In later classes we used this book, which I see in the bookshelves of my coworkers: http://www.amazon.com/Microelectronic-Circuits-Electrical-Co...

If you want to learn more basic concepts, I'd recommend looking perhaps for a class in your area to audit, or possibly mit ocw might have something.

I will say the following though:

1) many folks in industry get to a point to where they rarely, if not never sit down on paper and do node-voltage analysis. They eventually get a conceptual "feel" for everything and work in simulation environments (matlab, spice, etc.). The best way to get here is to do the conceptual exercises on paper first, then play with a simulator afterwards.

2) designing basic analog circuits can be learned from textbooks, but doing more "active" things like building a switching power supply requires more specific books.

I like the concept of this site, although I wish it could somehow portray other factors that are important to what makes a good work environment: a short (hopefully carless) commute, great people to work with, good lunch food either nearby or at the cafeteria.

Yes, they did: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/packagerforiphone/

I would think the market should be responsible for judging quality, not a sole company. On the app store you can request a refund, or give a review as well.

Fully agree, and now that FF4beta7 fixed some of it's font issues, I'm switching back to it from Chrome. Here's why:

1) Panorama (a.k.a. tab candy). I can finally organize my tabs into little projects.

2) Much less restricted extension support. There a number of extensions that just aren't possible on chrome.

3) I hate the chrome start page, while helpful I find it usually leads me to distracting sites CoughHNCough instead of the reason I opened the browser instead. I call it Google's "Keep browsing" tactic. More annoying It always comes up on new tab/new window, even if you have the default home page set otherwise.

yeah, I agree. I thought about this today and realized some of the worst advice we got was from our middle school principal telling us to be well-rounded and develop real-world skills. It's the opposite of forcing yourself to focus on things that make you be "special".

And it made me more concerned about fitting into little social groups than focusing on what I want to do.

Not quite advice, but was a running theme of what many millenial-generation kids were told in the US (think "Mr. Rogers" era).

Many argue it's made use seem overly demanding to others, particularly bosses.

I actually understood the one-button mouse idea recently. It forces software developers to try not to hide all the useful features behind right-click menus, but figure out how to consistently lead a user to where they want to go.

User Story: My wifi wasn't working on my windows laptop the other day, I knew there was some nice "troubleshoot network" button, but I could not find it for the life of me every time i clicked on the wifi icon, causing me to go through the "network and sharing center" menu . 10 minutes later I finally realized right-clicking instantly brought up the troubleshoot menu.

"Apple essentially has no consumer-level desktop outside of the iMac. For example, there's no "headless iMac" to select. "

I know they're expecting to compare a low-price tower, but I wonder why they didn't consider comparing the mac mini.

I'm working on similar goals right now, but focusing on making a bookscanner (see http://diybookscanner.org ) instead, namely because many of the books I have are out of print. I figure I can later just use the bookscanner for documents as well

ugh, I was about to say yes to this but something came up, would still like to meetup sometime though.

Wow, as a hardware/software guy this is comforting to hear.

And it's true, there's lots of poorly architected software out in engineering-land.

Yes, I'm totally down for a meetup! It's really easy to feel like a lone techie in this town...

I'd rather consider using truecrypt and do plausible deniability, and own hardware I don't have to get too emotional about keeping.

I think he's relating to the "book of five rings" / "art of war" way of writing books.

Theres many big long books that are merely churned out, or are written before an author has reached a point of completeness about the subject he's writing on. Worse, they could be written as "wines of fear" where they are written not to directly offend anyone.

On the other hand, there are a few beautiful books that are short, yet establish mental frameworks that cover all the other books. The book of five rings is touted as one.

Personal example: There's volumes of business books that all harken back to people being some mixture of evangelist, maven, or relater. Books like "the human fabric" or religious books like the "bhagavad gita" establish the same framework.

Because you end up spending your life with no memories other than a blank canvas, and because you won't stay alive with only a blank canvas.

"Happiness is only realized when it is shared." Communicating ideas without a few wrecked canvases never works.

As far as i know, most artists continuously start with blank canvases. The "wrecked" ones are the ones everyone buys to help the artist eat.

thank you so much. I'm trying to explore the possibility of addressing an industry-wide problem through starting an open-source foundation.

Do you know anyone who has gone through the effort of convincing the boss not just to leverage open-source, but start such a thing from scratch?

Personally, I was never a fan of indian cities when I travelled there. I'd like to live near a cheap beach town like Gokarna or this place near Mangalore : http://surfingindia.net/node/10 . That said there's likely no tech/startup culture out here, but hopefully much less smog/air quality issues.

Upvoted Pondicherry as that looks pretty promising too.

I know I've debated with another HNer on this. I like the smaller 3.5" lcd (nexus one, iphone) because I can use it to go workout, and let it fit in my jeans without poking out. I consider anything bigger to be more of a "purseable" phone.

I'm happy I bought a used nexus one instead this week. I'd only want this phone if they improved the camera optics and sold it with pentaband 3G. I'm in the niche "traveler without a point-and-shoot camera" market though.

I'm indian american, and honestly don't have many indian or indian american friends (just never found many in the social circles I like). But I have a few fun stories:

1) Someone in another group hired some fresh-out-grad-school Indians, and a few months ago I was bored and googled their names. One of them was asking for code for some algorithm on a java forum. I didn't care much about it, I was more impressed that the guy used his full name on the forum. I realized though that indians have a bigger problem with not fully sharing the problem they're trying to solve, and just come off as asking for random things instead.

2) I had to work with a big name customer who hired two foreign university kids trying to leverage an API I wrote. On a call they demanded source code for everything the API supplied in order to write their app (they didn't need it all), and constantly emailed me about questions reading a industry-wide spec would've answered. Luckily they eventually stopped working there and my email got a lot easier.

3) I tried to hire a contractor recently, and after struggling with agencies, I decided to give craigslist a try. I'm going to write a blog post about this one day, but basically 75% of the names I received were of south asian descent. Nothing wrong with that, I read every one of those emails. The problem is that of that 75%, half of those were outsourcing "$9 / hour" agencies, and a good portion of the other half didn't have experience relevant to the position.

Big lesson learned with 3. As an indian american, I gotta really step up my networking skills in order to find other positions. If I want to apply for a position over the internet, I ABSOLUTELY must do things to stand out from the piles of emails. I already take time to write personalized cover letters, but have to have a non-standard title to stick out, and have some internet presence for them to feel comfortable with me.

Make no racial generalizations though. I've met indian folks out there that are truly amazing geeks, and can comfortably talk to you about lisp / clojure / rethinkdb / etc. I last met one in an IRS office of all places.

thanks!

While I love your blog tynan, I have a question for twitter: Since when did it become ok to get someone else's twitter handle just due to inactivity? And if the change occurred in only five minutes, was there any warning to the existing user?

Domain names operate on a principle where you pay for your name every year, and get several warning emails that you will lose your account if you fail to pay.

Edit: read JCS's post, makes sense as long as they clearly state how inactive you must be. That said, could you get kicked off of twitter if you merely use it to "lurk" your friend's protected tweets?

There's nothing wrong with "finding muses" to support yourself.

For all we know, Kreci already has an amazing and interesting project he's working on, but it takes small android apps to fuel him time to work on it.

Who am I?

    American salaryman by day, wantrepreneur by night.

What Hardware am I Using?

    Just a lenovo T500 w/ windows 7 (and ubuntu virtualbox),
    and an iphone 3G (soon to be a nexus one).
    The iphone is jailbroken on tmobile, and I'm not a fan of how
    there's no springboard widget support, nor the pains of trying to
    maintain a jailbroken iphone. 
    I use a pair of Meelectronics M6(?) earbuds which are a steal.

    At work i use a Desktop running windows xp and 2 24" monitors.

And what software?

    real apps: Virtuawin, enso, chrome dev builds, Visual studio, vim, picasa, 
    and itunes (more of a winamp guy though), and sumatra pdf for reading books.

    f.lux is awesome, and seems to work better than redshift
    cloud apps: picasa web, irccloud, and countless other google apps

What is my dream setup?

   I want a laptop the size of a macbook air, but with a desktop-fast processor
   that is largely disabled on battery, but fires up when docked at home. 
   It must also be dead silent, and seamlessly dock to a desktop graphics card. 

   I used to only use a desktop machine 5-6 years ago. and I'm coming to 
   realize doing everything on one big honking laptop sucks. Laptops are 
   terrible ergonomically. Part of me still wants to travel 
   and work though. So I also want a big display that I can roll up in my backpack, 
   and an ergonomic chair i can pack easily too.

   Lastly, I want a cheap offsite backup setup that let's me upload/backup tons
   of stuff without much thought. I also want ZFS/Freenas to be more drobo-like. 
   I'd buy a drobo in a heartbeat if they said it just used ZFS and I never heard 
   horror stories about them.

   Realistically, I'm likely going to get either a desktop or x201s+dock or 
   hp envy 14, notion ink tablet, and a quiet low power freenas system.

What do you use for backups?

searching for "backup" and "time machine" and "rsync" only reveals 3 results total.