thesethings

(You're probably getting all sorts of back-seat job-hunters giving you/her advice, so apologies if this is frustrating.)

I highly recommend she network/attend events/meet industry people outside of a job hunting context. What technical topics is she into? What business topics? She should be around topics/events she naturally finds interesting, and lots of opportunities will come up.

Though I have my own indie business and am not seeking employment, people inquire about jobs I may be interested in all the time. (My point? If you're concerned her current job status is influencing things, having people admiring of one's ideas, talent, etc... before they even know where you work... would solve that dynamic.)

I feel especially confident about this recommendation because like your wife, I have more of an IT background than dev (which is indisputably undergoing a talent shortage... but so is IT.)

If she's more into virtual networking/learning, I can't recommend Twitter enough. You have to put effort into following great folks, but I've learned so much stuff from Twitter buddies.

buena suerte :D

[aside: I am also English/Spanish bilingual and have just started to enjoy http://www.noticiashacker.com, which is a Spanish Hacker News. She may like that, too.]

Thanks for the thoughtful response. It's funny that we had thread right before Square dropped their reverse-CRM bombshell.

Despite being a tool for the buyer more than the seller, the new app definitely incentivizes businesses to become part of the Square ecosystem.

Also, can anyone familiar with point of sale systems compare the two?

I saw an interview with Jack once where he mentioned cool reporting without going into details. It seems possible that the value of Squares should also include the cost/fees of POS systems (minus cost of your ipad/iphone/ipod that connects to your Square).

You're totally right that it has a generational component. But it's not just the generation of the company, it's the generation of the employee.

Consumerization (apologies for the buzzword) of internal business technology is an undeniable force that even slow-to-notice Gartner recognizes.

A few things are conspiring to help move Macs into the enterprise, even in older companies:

* the Internet. (the biggest reason of all. So much of info workers use all day is on the web. Good ol' I barely-care-what-OS-you're-on web).

* desktop virtualization like VMware Fusion made it so employees who could do 90% of their work w/out Windows, could still login to that one timekeeping app that required Windows.

* the iphone (especially) + android were so much better, so far ahead of Blackberries that Exchange-friendly connectors were written.

* BYOC (Bring your own computer) movement. Multiple enterprise IT departments, even in old school companies, are using a system where a stipend is given to an employee to buy his/her own computer.

* Google Apps (see also: The Internet). But more specifically, Google Apps dislodges the Exchange/Outlook roots that are the number one reasons big corps can't leave Windows.

Word. Yeah, I wasn't doubting the power of LinkedIn profiles to be public, just how gatekeeper-y they tended to be ("in between you and an opportunity, stands LinkedIn") :D

I have numerous thoughts about LinkedIn. I am kinda disappointed by it.

(I am a social software nerd, so no offense if anybody tunes out for this...)

I love the Internet. And LinkedIn is like 90% not taking advantage of the Internet. It's mostly a digital version of old school processes.

I know more people offered jobs via Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, StackOverflow, HN than LinkedIn.

I guess this all goes back to "jobs offers/business deals happen because of relationships..." LinkedIn is basically bad at cultivating relationships/communities. It started out requiring symmetric (like Facebook) relationships, which i think has many bad side-effects. Also, despite doing it years before other good QA sites, their searchable, linkable questions/advice content is weak.

Relationships aside, for presenting work/history, things like about.me/Flavors.me, despite not being made to be resumes, are also promising. (here is stuff i MADE, here is stuff i've presented, here is stuff i've coded, here is a gallery of my work, etc).

Lately LinkedIn has been making OKCupid-esque cool use of all the data they have. I love the reports they're making. But i don't feel this is really being integrated into the user's experience of what it means to be a LI member. (It's more like these reports are a by-product.)

I hold out hope. But for how long they've been around, and how many users they have, and how basic the part of life they address is... LI really makes very little out of a giant opportunity + early advantage.

--

Good luck on your current job hunt. I'm sure you'll get snatched up in no time. Ignore my LI rant. If it's working well for you, werq it. :-)

Are you saying it happens a lot, or that it doesn't happen that often?

I have never seen that, myself.

You can import public JSON/XML/CSV/HTML(and other) data.

You can connect/import private stuff with the Secure Data Connector, though I don't know all the types supported.

http://code.google.com/securedataconnector/docs/1.3/overview...

You can get everything out w/the API, too.

At this moment, there is no experience or feature parity. Many of the Live apps require IE + Silverlight to be collaborative (though I bet they do away with this, it seems MS is moving away from Silverlight for some things.)

Often when I mention this, an MS person says, "you don't need Silverlight + IE." It's technically true. It will revert to a "dumb" mode if you don't use that.

Also, some of the web versions, even w/IE + Silverlight, don't have realtime group editing. (Like the Word-esque app.)

This year they launched Office365, which they market as their cloud offering. It does have some hosted features, but the client they want you to use is not a web browser, but local copies of Office.

Web-based collab tools from MS are a moving target. They've switched their branding and strategy 4 times in the past two years. I don't think they're on the right track yet. They need to just bite the bullet and do a pure web offering. They know how to do it. It's not lack of ability. They just don't want to hurt the goose that lays the golden egg. Can't blame 'em. But then they can't blame us for diving deeper into Google Docs, which gets more interesting and flexible every week.

My point is that you might be measuring customer needs/migration path in a way differently than customers do (if you repeatedly see them move away to a 3rd party, especially one particular 3rd party).

A common theme in this thread is that people inside Rackspace see Rackspace Cloud + Slicehost as very similar, because 1) they have a common corp ownership 2) they have an increasingly common (but hidden-to-users) back-end 3) they have common staff in some cases.

But the customers in this thread see Linode + Slicehost as much more similar because 1) their control panels are a bit more similar 2) they share DNS flexibility + other featuers 3) Price (Linode moving in more attractive direction for some use-cases).

Neither interpretation is necessarily right, but in this era it's definitely time to rethink what customer needs are (if you're outlining a migration path). I don't think RS is wrong for discontinuing Slicehost (I'd definitely wanna EOL older products), I just think they're wrong in how they parse features, experiences, and what user needs are.

I see since I posted earlier that user:polvi (hiya!) says the Cloudkick posse is working on the control panel for RSC. I've no doubt that all providers will greatly up their UX game (something something Dave McClure design dogma :D).

It just feels disingenuous for RS peeps to say over and over "Slicehost services are not dying, it's just the brand that's going away" when real features and real UX are going away, at least for a window of time. And it's totally normal for users to go where those features and UX can be found, even if it's a separate company. To users, that feels easier.

Thank you for making an awesome product in Slicehost.

You mention that "...control panels...are only ephemerally important..."

Many in this thread disagree. You can see it getting brought up over and over as a reason we loved Slicehost, and a reason we don't like other alternatives as much.

I won't get too deep into UX theory here, so I'll just say this: people who make apps: if you hear the same comments over and over from your customers, they might be on to something interesting.

I truly believe in the expression "listen to what your users do, not what they say." So i'm not gonna pretend every lil gripe we have about this is right. But there is definitely a pattern in this thread that Rackspace can learn from.

[update: so far i've counted 18 mentions of the phrase "control panel" in this thread. it, and all user experience, matters a lot.]

Thanks for the info on Intuit's unfortunate lobbying activities. That stuff does matter to me. I'll be reading into it. (Though sheesh, neither pre-filled out forms, nor free e-filing would be as radical as simpler tax policy. :D)

As for TaxAct, at least the onboarding process wasn't as nice as TurboTax on the day I was doing my comparison shopping. But I definitely will give it a try + trust your opinion (i peeped your profile and suspect you know more about consumer financial services than i do, heh).

I haven't used Square or the Intuit payment device, but here is a semi-relevant bit about Intuit:

I randomly tried TurboTax (owned by Intuit) this year. My friends used it. I trusted their taste, but only that it was the best of mediocre options. I was wrong. The app was amazing. One of the best apps of any kind I've ever used. The UX from the visual progress workflow to the copywriting de-stressing you out about taxes (but not getting forced-humorous), saving sessions that you time out (you're gonna time out something as long as your taxes, trust + believe)... Just everything. I know it sounds crazy, but doing my taxes was actually fun.

Anyway... I bring this up because they also own Mint, which lots of people think is pretty nice, too (but its heritage predates Intuit's purchase of it).

All I know is... I have faith in Intuit to make something truly nice. I am really rooting for Square, because I always root for disruptive upstarts, but i hope they both make slightly different variations of stuff that will help customers.

Word. Food is a tougher than a lot of other p2p marketplace ideas because of legal FUD.

I am very excited to use Munchery in Portland. Food delivery in general is good in Portland (in terms of selection), but stops early (10PM).

A tweak on this idea is Housefed (http://housefed.com). (Which rather than target professional chefs on the producer side, targets normal folks, and is a bit more social than transactional.)

(Full disclosure: Housefed founder Emile is a buddy.)

SF's recent urban agriculture law (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/20/... making it legal for you to sell things you grow in your garden) makes me feel hopeful that the government will generally ease up on making these p2p relationships easier. I see so many rad food startups stepping very gingerly into the marketplace + am rooting for the all.

I feel you, but in many cases a comparison can save a lot of work for both the explainer and understand-er :D

"It's a peer to peer marketplace where both commercial entities and individual consumers can rent-"

"oh, like airbnb?"

Exacto. I'm very excited about their program and totally supportive, but I just left a light-hearted comment/jab about the paradoxical geographical requirement in light of this blog post :D

Preso just ended, small update: there will be both free + pay service. For now, everything free. So we still don't have details, but we know the model they are pursuing.

It also supports multiple frameworks/languages.

For Photoshop, Pixelmator, a paid Mac app, has definitely undercut them. It's $60.

And it's not just cheaper, it's less buggy and faster.

Adobe CS isn't just unpopular because of its pricing, it's really inconsistent, painful software.

To anybody reading this: I highly recommend Pixelmator. It has a free trial, check it out.

^^ Agreesies w/citricsquid. (Due to the fact that it's highly customizable, Tumblr gets compared to MySpace. But paradoxically, due to the fact that many of its early adopters are wburg hipsters w/great taste, it also has a rep for having excellent design biases. Checkout the default themes. Gorgeous.)

But it truly is more like Twitter (or even Facebook) than MySpace due to the fact that it's for publishing (or sharing) content more than pimping a profile.

This is very hard to see from "the outside" (where people are more likely to compare it to Wordpress because it's "just a blog"). But what you don't know until you use it, is that more than half the party is inside the system. The Tumblr themes are never even seen because you're experiencing your friends + followers through a Dashboard view. You're Liking, Reblogging (not too unlike retweeting), adding commentary, asking questions (that are hidden on the outside), squeeing over famous followers, etc.

Tumblr, like Twitter is a place. You can interact with people w/out asking them to visit your-site-somewhere-else. Unlike Twitter, is has the advantage of also being a destination. That link you're sharing? That essay you wrote? It's all right here, still on the Tumblr.

[edit: Businesses see its popularity. Tumblr has as many users as Twitter did two years ago. IBM, The Economist, The Today Show (!?), most Conde Nast magazines, YC start-ups like Convore, high-end hotels... I've seen 'em all on Tumblr.]

As for what the original post is about: It's a fair question. Tumblr is easier than WP. But that's not why it's popular. It's the social part. While we wait for our utopian federated, distributed social networks to arrive, these centralized places are pretty great.

Oh right, I remember that. Thanks for the link.

Sincere question: has anybody ever punked a journalist as an April Fools prank?

Thanks for posting this. Portland + Seattle also have underground restaurants (which got so trendy they bore a legit manifestation, "Family Supper" ah, Portland...)

I did some research about this since yesterday and found mostly information for selling food you make in your house, but sell outside your house. They call it "cottage food," (i knew the expression, but not what i meant legally). I found out that "cottage food acts" are enacted state by state, and that Oregon (where I live) has a permissive one.

As for serving food right in your house, i haven't found much info yet.

Yes, you can find people you've interacted with on HN by browsing Threads (top nav) and Next -> Next -> Nexting through your history. Though the URL of each deep page is not permanent, the threads/history do not disappear and you can always browse your history.

URLs of threads/parent/child comments are permanent.

Threads are not deleted, though they can get hard to find. Definitely save the URL, but don't worry about copy and pasting the contents.

Another great HN tool is http://searchyc.com. You can search submission submission titles, comments, and get feeds for most types of things.

(Sidebar: your place sounds cool! Will definitely consider it the next time I'm down there from Portland.)

I am completely ignorant about the legal hoops involved w/food prep/selling, though I feel it's implicit in the open-ness and formality of sites like Housefed/Munchery/Mealtik that they consider themselves legal, at least by some interpretation (like room & board? like school bake sales? Like farmer's markets with prepared food? I am legally clueless... yet can think of many places in life where I'm paying for food in non-traditional environments.)

Just as AirBnB has come under fire from "real" hotels in NYC, I'm sure this will food-at-home will come under bureacratic heat... if it gets traction.

(Even in Portland, which I think just passed 600(!!) food carts in 2011, "real" restaurants decided (years too late) to start complaining that food carts weren't legit (though they do have health inspections, business licenses. http://www.portlandfoodanddrink.com/2010/09/are-food-carts-g... ))

If it's not too troublesome, can you go into where you think the hard line is for in-home food selling?

Hmm. I think this will be very much like AirBnB for food, but it's in a gestation stage w/kitchen show-off shots to build a community first.

There's also Mealtik, which is AirBnB for food.

Ultimately, I hope all three (or more) you folks go big, as the biggest problem will be skeptical customers and perhaps buzzkill regulators (like AirBnB in NYC is up against).

Having a bunch of momentum + market examples and flavors is the best way to get past all this.

As a user of Housefed before today's front-page-on-HN, I want to give folks a heads up that it looks like the traffic may be causing a few bugs.

If anything feels strange, definitely return after a bit.

That was true for a moment. They did the Google/Bing firehose deals before they had promoted tweets/trends program.

Not sure if it meets your criteria, but there http://blog.crashspace.org in Culver City. I'm up in Portland, but have admired it from afar. Seems to have some great events, especially lots of hardware hacking.

Word. You're right. I was over-hypey :D It doesn't totally pass the silhouette test. It could with a thin edge of negative space in between each color block, OR... if we allowed a grey "cheat" in our silhouette test.

These kinda shape logos aren't just awesome for print, but in tiny places like web footers, twitter avatars, etc.

And for anybody in the thread rackin' their brain trying to figure out what we're talking about. Picture the Nike swoosh, or the Apple-missing-a-bite apple. With no gradients, colors, or shadows, their shape alone is recognizable.

This doesn't mean their every use + instance is this plain, but their logos survive such a deconstruction. It REALLY comes in handy.