_Lemon_

Yes, and I meant to say that would be a bad thing. For example, Welsh is compulsory in schools in Wales where most will know English fluently, there is quite a political effort to keep it going.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as a troll!

The OP originally struck me as a negative comment but reading it again makes me think it was more of just an observation.

I wasn't trying to say having one language is a good/bad thing, but everyone having say, a common language, could benefit all as it opens up more possibilities with people.

I'm not sure I came off right in the second sentence. I meant as if people only chose English and leaving behind their heritage / culture (as amichail suggested below) that would be bad.

Yes, I'm an English only speaker (I believe the majority of the world are bilingual now too), and so are my parents :)

I'm not sure whether you're intending to pose that as a problem -- why should language be a barrier to anything? It could open the possibilities to a lot of people in less well off countries.

What would be a problem (and is kind of assumed in what you're saying) is if people stopped learning their native language in favour of English.

As it's not immediately obvious, the original site being parodied: http://www.weusecoins.com/

> Finding security holes in commercial systems and discreetly notifying the owners of the problem is one thing

Last time this happened to me, I gave 6 months free on a dedicated server which was announced in an e-mail that went out to around a thousand users (the focus was explaining why feature x was disabled for the past few days).

It was brought up in discussion that it was probably too much, but the alternative to me was terrifying considering the amount of tickets opened because of the preventative measures.

I'd contest that it would only matter if you're the same as everyone else if it's contrary to your goal(s). What is your goal? For most it would be to get users to purchase something (aka, make money).

There's the other upside that if your website isn't radically different from others, a lot of your users will already know how to use it. There could be a lot to gain with a lot of your visitors knowing how to extract information from it.

I guess the only real way to know is by testing!

I keep telling myself that I need to explore "real" news sites like the BBC or Guardian (or...), but never quite get there.

I primarily stick to Slashdot and HN but know full well that the views in the comments of the two sites can sometimes be very detached/different from the rest of society.

While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is something to be careful of and I'd hate to find the day all of my own opinions fit a site perfectly.

I'm not actually an ISP so my perspective is different but yeah I do, and I know the ISPs that I work with do too (Leaseweb, OVH). I have to work to keep things clean on my servers and to take reasonable steps to abide by their policies and inform my customers (although this kind of goes without saying).

One of the problems I imagine is size, I can still handle my couple of thousand customers and provide "good" support with enough time to investigate something that is described as a slowloris attack. I can open a dialogue with the customer and tell them that what they did was a little bit stupid and for the most part, the customer will understand and stop.

Although there was a time when I did investigate, couldn't find anything immediate (I'm spending say 5-10 minutes pruning a few TB of data here...) so the next point was to catch them in the act with a few iptables rules. Then the person who e-mailed me (and my host) pretty much turned hostile/gained a sense of entitlement and that was that. I wasn't much interesting in putting more time into it (so, didn't!). However this guy only produced a few text logs that could have been easily forged and I never heard more about it... who knows?

That also leads to another angle, how do you know who is telling the truth? The hosts are likely to side with the paying customer (well you never know with OVH) and there is little an outsider can do to prove their case in point except with easily fabricated text logs and events.

It's strange really, some of the people who I have followed up on have been very grateful (perhaps because they got their way), much in the same way going the extra mile for a customer might.

As someone who runs a hosting company -- yes I fully investigate with the information given. Just please try to give as much as possible and make it easy for me to easily pinpoint things.

Oh, and please don't come with a snooty attitude, it's not pleasant to work with.

Use https://www.google.com/

Although some services (I believe Images and Shopping are two) are not available because they're "not ready" yet.

Could you expand on what you saw, generally what your thought process was, and how you feel it could apply to business ideas and social apps in general?

I understand that it may be obvious and I'm sure I'd have plenty of ideas myself, I'm just curious of the mindset and psyche behind your (as another person) thinking.

I clicked and gave it a run, hitting the defaults I was presented with "752 / 8". My mind just lost interest (it is almost 4am mind you) and I closed the tab.

Then it occurred to me that this arithmetic would be much easier if I had built up to it, i.e. I was used to doing sums like that.

So, with that in mind, perhaps you need to offer more? I mean, a lot more. Ways to track my progress as I do build up, ways to give me good places to push the boundaries of my mental arithmetic. I mean, you could go on extending it and making more useful. You could dig out research for the best way to get the user to learn.

I'm thinking along the lines of the "goal" to be able to perform sums like those Japanese students who use abacuses to solve massive sums very quickly even once the abacus is removed.

There are plenty of interesting features you could add to it! Make people grow from it!

I would imagine your target audience would be the younger generation with their parents (schools?) paying their son's education interests. I could imagine every parent seriously considering purchasing if their child was interested.

> I drove an old porsche I found in a junkyard

This (along with a lot of other stuff you mentioned...) is interesting, what happened? Were you just looking around a junkyard and stumbled across it? What state did you get it in and how much did you know about cars when you got it?

I found this on your site but it didn't give much background info: http://trickykegstands.com/porsches.html

> In my opinion, the biggest problem with the google-style interview (other companies do the same thing) is that you can practice and get better at it. In fact, you can probably improve how well you do so much that even a mediocre developer can come out looking very good.

While this is true, isn't quite unlikely? Why not just invest the time into becoming a /good/ developer.

>"How can you detect loops in a singly-linked list without modifying nodes / keeping accounting information around?"

What do you mean by "accounting" information?

In the real-world I'd probably just brute-force it and keep around a set of elements already gone over. However I couldn't imagine ever having a need for that as I'd (and hopefully anyone I was working with) stick to the standard push_back functions available or that I created. So it shouldn't come about...

I feel I've missed something here, so care to elaborate on the answer?

$db is something different altogether, in my code I have a cheap Database class and each model creates a new one -- but it relies on the MySQL functions it uses to re-use the database connection. So in reality it's the same thing.

The problem with not using a constant where it's necessary is that you're communicating the wrong thing to someone else or even yourself 6 months down the line. You might want to re-evaluate what you see as "ugly code" especially if it changes how you write the code.

You're specifically using it for configuration/preferences though. You should consider changing it to a constant instead as that's what they really are.

The problem is passing state around in global variables. Any code can (and readily does) modify the state which is the problem.

Generally a good experience, needs adding to. Here's some feedback/thoughts:

1) The text boxes on the sign up page are massive and take up the whole line (same with the login). 2) Sign up process isn't that "smooth", how about an automatic log in instead of asking me to check my inbox? (I have my e-mail open and it made me sigh...) 3) The sign up e-mail has a massive wall of text on how to use the application. While it's good explaining, I feel that in the e-mail is the wrong place. Making it a webpage will allow you to more comfortably use bullet points and numbers and just easier to digest/find. Or perhaps an interactive thing and point to page elements? 4) You put a $ sign in amount field and I took this as an opportunity to change to £ which didn't work as expected. What about putting it as "Amount ($)" or removing it entirely. 5) Sensible default of "1" on the recurring once enabled? 6) Data entry is a problem. 7) Missed setting a transaction to "recurring every" and had to delete and re-add to set it. 8) Bug! Added a recurring transaction as 15 but set the type to expense, went to edit it and change it back to income. This only changed the first transaction and further recurring transactions were left unchanged. Clicking on the refresh button and it's now still showing all the items as expenses again. 9) You could drop the "type" entirely and get the user to enter -15 for expense and just 15 for an income! 10) Editing the recurring transactions and I hit edit and I don't realise the form above me has changed -- perhaps some sort of visual cue? Or perhaps, click the fields and they become editable? 11) No back button (browser's button uses stale data) to the page I was on before. Resorted to clicking the "Dashboard". 12) Bug! Still entering data, missed the "Amount" field and it has reset my type to "Expense". Strange that it doesn't reset the type when I miss "recurring every" value.

Sweet! I'm finished! Problem: I would quite like to have more financial projections but currently the problem is entering the data; you'd need ways to easily add it (e.g. various import functions or an API. The way I see things:

cost of adding data + cost of the app (what you would charge) < cost of doing this myself (e.g. investing time to graph the projections using my own database (saving on data entry time!))

Grouping would also be a good feature to have e.g. I would want to project transactions for separate things.

Controlling how far in the future I can see the forecase, although I realise this is probably just a proof of concept app.

> Customers, particularly ADHD tech types, are very sensitive to shipping delays.

Just to expand on this: very /very/ sensitive. However providing them an accurate date upfront is a great way to combat this, even if it is a week away. Adjust it accordingly and don't break your first promise to a new customer.

The moment the clock ticks over the 7th day (and I mean, they will wait /exactly/ 1 minute past 7 days for this). They will open up every support channel and complain loudly and demand a lot from you. It's just not worth the hassle!

"If you wear the jersey of your favorite team, your brain associates the colors and the logo with the good feelings of watching a game. The rational part of your brain might tell you that you wear the team jersey because you look good in those colors, or you support the team."

This reinforces what I've been told about how people buy stuff (from a sales person). People make their decision first based on emotion then later back that up with rational thought.

There's a comment beneath you that quotes the page (near the bottom) "you can not send emails (you can receive them)."

Although I agree with you, a comment explaining would have been better than a down-vote -- best not to take those personally!

I believe I've come up with an effective solution to the problem: to not have all my eggs in one basket. I realise I do lead a bit of a love/hate relationship with OVH though.

I've taken new servers with Leaseweb and I'm building up with them now, I also have a few with 100TB in the US too. So now that when a customer says they are having poor speeds I just need to verify that it's to do with the bandwidth and explain the situation and this works very well for me. I can then move them to a new server and everyone is happy, it's an easier way to deal with something other than "err, sorry, would you like a refund?"

Although I realise I'm unique in that I can just move them around (well, 95% of the time). What would concern me is running a business critical website on a provider that doesn't provide international bandwidth.

I have 307 servers from the smallest to the largest and thousands of customers all round the world so I see the bandwidth problems first hand. There have been a couple of occasions when there network just hasn't been available to parts of America (measured in number of complaints I have to deal with).

The concern is, just because it works for you, doesn't mean it will work for all of your customers. Especially if they're not in the EU.

I'm not so sure on the cooling either -- their hard disks are very hot (I admit I don't know enough about hardware to say whether this is a problem) but generally I don't see many hardware failures.

I do however see plenty of random reboots -- only the HG servers (and strangely a few 19.99 servers with over a year uptime) seem to survive these as you'd expect.

The .co.uk site is, they only sell to some EU countries.

You can see a full list of their languages and sites at the top here: https://www.ovh.co.uk/managerv3/login.pl

I feel I could write an essay on the pros and cons of OVH but it basically comes down to bandwidth quality.

You're only really paying for the cost of the hardware, the rest is a heavy reliance on peering with no or little transit links (you'll see they only sell to some EU countries).

This guy is more than just an Internet celebrity though, this guy runs a search engine as a competitor to them -- why are they watching his blog? (Or did they come across it by accident?)

Speculative comment ahoy!

I tried, however it just meant another thing to have open and to check regularly.

We stick with IRC for conversations and e-mail for the matters that take a little longer to resolve. This suits better because e-mail and IRC are open anyway for customer contact all day long.

After actually taking the course (okay, a few years ago now). I would say Python was the most useful in that list and then Java.

There isn't enough time to learn C. We spent more time learning about cable types than actually programming.

There is an alien base situated directly behind the planet. Their own pollution and resource consumption is the direct result of the changes in the planet's atmosphere.

We haven't got long.

It's good but I'm not sure on the pricing. (Incidentally why is this "hidden" at the bottom of the front page?)

I'm comparing it to Google Checkout as it's what I currently use to take payments. How does it compare?

The first thing is that I don't know how you're taking money from the clients or prompting them to pay. Do they pay via PayPal or Google Checkout or do they have options? "get paid online through PayPal" would suggest they do.

If so, how do you make money? What's your secret to getting such a low price? I think I'm paying Google several hundred each month to process my payments (PayPal would be the same) so are there hidden charges?

Is there an API? It's nice (and crucial for me being able to scale) not having to process all my clients manually.

Please correct me if I've completely gone off the plot but this is my stream of consciousness. I do like the front page!

Subtle change in the headlines here: GB/s to Gb/s. Things get confusing quickly but B is bytes, and b is bits. (Except when it says something like MBits).

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