aasarava

Tip to anyone rolling out a library and wanting others to start using it: It'd be helpful if the home page or the FAQ explained what io.js actually does and why a developer might want to explore it further. "Bringing ES6" is only helpful if you know what ES6 is and have already decided it's something you need. Likewise, the FAQ simply says io.js is compatible with Node.js and npm, but that doesn't give you much to work with. Can someone who knows the project explain the benefits?

Oh I wasn't making any judgement on the business itself. Just pointing out that, if anything, he probably hasn't profited as handsomely as the article implies.

What the article doesn't address is whether this guy's business actually makes any money. It might make sense as a good bet if he paid $9.99 for birdflu.com, but $20,000? Has he actually resold any of his domains for large sums?

Do you have any sources for this other than, literally, "dad's dad's friend who heard a rumor?"

S3 lets you essentially park a domain on a bucket and serve files from the URL, including .html. No additional httpd needed.

Unions seem to offer the most benefits to industries where workers' skills are commodity -- a factory worker can fairly quickly be replaced by someone else who can assemble equipment. A bus driver can be replaced by someone who else with the proper license.

Using this constant threat of replacement -- "there's someone waiting to take your job and happy to do it for less if you complain" -- management can hold back wages and take advantage of employees. Hence, the union fights for things like standardized salaries and tenure and so on.

Good developers/engineers aren't easily replaceable. As much as outsourcers and body shops want managers to believe you can just tell any developer what to do build and you will always get the same result, we all know that one bad developer can ruin a project and a great developer is often worth way more than 10 mediocre ones.

So as long as developers are being valued individually for the skills they bring to an organization, it's better for them to negotiate individually rather than bargain collectively.

> "SmartThings, released a similar statistic, noting ... users opening the app four times a day and receiving fifteen notifications per day."

This sounds like hell. I don't need my house sending me notifications throughout the day.

When I first bought a home, I was excited about adding automation to the various fixtures and devices. I quickly came the conclusion that the simple light switch is a pretty intuitive UI that doesn't need to be made more complicated. I'm going to bet that's the real reason home automation hasn't taken off.

This was posted by another HN member a couple months ago but received no comments. I reposted since the video has received more attention in the past several days and Anita Sarkeesian and her family have now received death threats, simply for Sarkeesian's commentary on women in video games.

It's really import to look for ways to make your organization more efficient (and these are good starting points) -- but I think there's a common misunderstanding between this sort of efficiency and the efficiency that economists talk about in relation to firms.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but economists don't mean firms are "smooth flowing". They are saying that firms are more efficient relative to other firms and one-on-one marketplaces.

E.g., it's inefficient for individuals to go directly to a marketplace to buy parts for a printer and then to find someone to assemble those parts. It's much more efficient for a firm to step in and handle the sourcing of the parts and to create a single place where people can buy them.

That doesn't mean the firm has to be completely without internal friction.

SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote (SF Bay Area)

I'm looking for a Drupal 7 developer with very strong experience themeing, creating complex Views, and writing custom modules. Looking for someone who believes in doing things the "Drupal way" as opposed to creating short-term hacks. Must be comfortable with git. Organic Groups experience is a plus.

We'd start you out with a small, paid project setting up a slightly-more-complicated-than-usual View on an existing site and then themeing it, to see how you do. If we're a good fit for working together, I have a number of large projects in the pipeline I could use your help with on an ongoing basis.

I'm looking for someone who is a full-time, independent freelancer -- i.e, someone's who's available to collaborate/Skype/email during typical US working hours.

Get in touch via the email address in my profile and let me know your Drupal.org ID, and any relevant D7 sites that you've built (and your role in them). Thanks!

Curious: what are some examples of citizen-led governance beginning to render states irrelevant? Likewise, where are you seeing a collapse of less entrenched governments all over the planet?

Right. Or if that question isn't current enough, how about: What do you consider the Snowden revelations about the NSA?

There may well be a lot of bad, boring, or inconsequential journalism out there designed to generate click-throughs -- the push for this is partly why I left the industry -- but you can look up the list of Pulitzer Prize winners, recent and past, if you need a reminder of why we need an independent press that acts as a public service.

Wow. If news is only "content" that exists to sell advertising, then sure, go ahead and believe that there'd be no problem if journalism were to "tear down, or at least modify, the 'Chinese wall' between content and the business side."

But if news consists, in some significant part, of journalism -- of gathering perspectives and verifying facts and giving voice to stories and ultimately serving as an independent check on government and power -- then it is troubling to think giving up on this is the only future Andreessen sees for news.

To the contrary, I think it illustrates your social awareness. You're exactly right -- in the first comment, he using dicks in a generic way to make a point about everyone in the room, including himself. This isn't the issue, really.

The issue is in his next comment when he jokes about Heidi handling his dick frequently. Yes, yes, it's a joke, so it's different from doing something physical like putting her hand on his crotch. But in telling the joke, he paints a picture of the one female in the room in a sexual position. Many people would be uncomfortable about that, even embarrassed. It's not a professional thing to do.

You're absolutely right that there is a lot of nuance in that particular situation, and you did a good job of breaking it down. But that's my point: Brad was taking a very big risk in thinking that Heidi was on the exact same page. And we know that other people, even trusted friends at times, can read situations very differently than we do. If Heidi was even slightly uncomfortable around Brad or, say, had been groped earlier that day -- things unbeknownst to Brad -- her reaction could have been quite different.

I've been in situations where the relationships between coworkers have been misread. In one case, two women reported a male coworker to HR after he sent out an email that many people, including other women in the group, seemed to think was innocuous.

So I'd hate for someone to read Roizen's post and think that that is the typical response to sexual jokes in the workplace. Even if everyone laughs in the moment, someone may walk away feeling ashamed. More to the point, if you're looking for a way to break the tension, you can probably find a way to do it without making a joke that could potentially make some uncomfortable.

She makes a really good point about pausing to evaluate the intent behind the words -- and even using the opportunity to educate -- rather than always assuming the worst.

But did anyone else feel that Brad Feld was very, very lucky that it was Heidi Roizen in the room and not someone less forgiving when he said, "well if you need a dick to hold you can borrow mine anytime"?

What Brad did in that one comment was underscore the power differential in the room between a number of males and a lone female who had just said she feels "very uncomfortable" (even if she couched it as a joke so as not to rock the boat.) Worse yet, Brad was essentially saying, you're here to service the males. Again, it was a comment made as a joke -- but what a crappy joke, to point out that there's an implicit hierarchy in the room.

The only way I can see how that comment would not have made a woman in the room very uncomfortable (or even any respectful male), is if he said it sardonically to make fun of guys who do say things like that without realizing why it's not acceptable.

EDIT: There are a lot of responses analyzing this particular situation and pointing out that Heidi said she wasn't uncomfortable. My point is not about Brad & Heidi, it is that you can't take this one very particular relationship and setting and extrapolate anything from it. The risk of misreading the situation and making someone feel harassed is so high and happens so often, that sexual innuendo in a professional setting is a bad idea. You can find another way to break the tension or team-build.

You're definitely not the only one. Trying to understand the interaction between the various Google properties makes me feel like an idiot -- and yet I'm a Web developer with a CS degree who has been using the Web just about every day since 1994.

For example, have you ever tried to schedule a Google Hangout chat? As far as I can tell, there's no way to do it from Google Hangouts. You need to first sign in to Google+, then go to Google Events and create a new event, and then you have to specify that it's a video event.

Is it a use case they just don't care about? Is there no one at the company who's looking at this setup and thinking, "wow, this is confusing and we can probably simplify that"? Or is my brain just getting too brittle to make sense of it?

That's an interesting take on the reason to bill hourly, and I know a lot of developers who do that. Personally I've switched to mainly doing fixed-bid contracts.

Rather than selling my time, a fixed-bid contract allows me to sell my expertise -- and that often is more lucrative. For example, a client may need a solution to putting hundreds of documents online and making them searchable. That may only be 40 hours of work, but it's a problem that has been costing the client tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity each year. As an expert, I can sell them a solution to their problem in a way that saves them money and is still profitable for me.

Beyond that, a well-written fixed bid contract lets everyone know exactly what the costs and expectations are, and what the schedule is. No more having projects drag on and conflicting with other projects I need to be focusing on when we all know that there's a set deadline for the delivery of a specific solution.

Of course, doing this successfully requires knowing what questions to ask to get a detailed spec, understanding how long it'll take you to really do something, and anticipating the gray areas.

I also like to build in "flex time" into fixed-bid contracts. For instance, I might specify that the contract includes "20 hours of revisions" to the requirements once the client has had a chance to review the prototype. I'll price this into the estimate. This way the client knows they'll have a chance to make changes, but they also know there's a limit after which the project cost increases.

This is good advice. I've been freelancing for 7 years. When you're talking with potential clients, it's reasonable to spend an hour or so talking about the project requirements and the client's needs and expectations, not to mention discussing your own background experience, to see if it's a good fit. I might then spend another hour or two looking at the client's specs and putting together an estimate.

But I don't do unpaid work for them. If they don't yet have a spec and are still exploring options, I let them know that one service I provide is consulting on a strategy and helping write a spec, creating wireframes, etc. They can hire me hourly to do that, and then decide later if they want to hire me to build it out.

Now, when you start bidding on much larger projects, you may spend more time reviewing specs. And you'll have to decide whether you want to get involved in the RFP process that some clients require. I typically opt out of those because they do require lots of unpaid work upfront. (I saw one RFP recently that wanted design mockups; no thanks.) And sometimes it seems as if clients have already chosen their vendor but need to do the RFP paperwork to make their decision seem legit.

I agree. But is interface design wholly in the realm of art? It's not a case of "this art will be viewed by a thousand people and some will get it and some won't." It's a case of "hundreds of thousands of paying customers need to know where on the screen to touch to open a new tab."

One of the things I appreciated about the past 20 years of Web design is that a set of traditions and conventions slowly formed, such that a user of one site could quickly figure out how to work the buttons or menus of another site.

Though there are some conventions now in flat and mobile design (like the hamburger icon to symbolize the menu), the steps one must learn to trigger actions on different devices -- touch that symbol over there, swipe to there, tap with two fingers here -- often feels more like some sort of conjuring of a spell than operating a device.

Can someone explain how HFT would "provide liquidity", which seems to always be the pro-HFT response? To use an analogy, if I want to buy a house and someone is selling a house, how does a third-party buying the house first and selling it to me a slightly higher price provide liquidity?

Let's stop with the "mind reading" warnings before they get too far out of hand and consider what's really happening: Six subjects were shown a "training" corpus of images first. Then shown new images. By comparing the subjects' responses to the new images, the software in the study presumably did its best to create composite images by pulling from the corpus.

So this raises many questions: How diverse were the faces in the training corpus? How close were the new images to those in the corpus? When you're looking at hundreds of images to train the machine, are you also unknowingly being trained to think about images in a certain way? What happens when you try to recreate faces based on the fMRI responses of subjects who didn't contribute to the initial training set?

The implications of the last question are pretty interesting . If different people have different brain responses to looking at the same image, does that help us begin to understand why you and I can be attracted to different types of people? Does it help begin to explain why two people can experience the same event but walk away with two completely different interpretations?

Actually, I'm inclined to bet this was one designer's concept and not the work of many people reviewing prototypes and giving feedback.

Design-by-group tends to produce boring, cluttered, seen-it-before layouts with little innovation. This seems to be on the completely opposite end of the spectrum -- with no one saying, "Uh, wait -- I think you need to make it clear that you can scroll for more info."

(And also: "Uh, I'm not sure developers are going to take kindly to Google requesting access to their microphones so soon after the NSA revelations.")

At some point, laptops, displays, and handheld devices started carrying built-in microphones and cameras as a feature. Perhaps the new feature is devices that don't have these things? To use a mic or camera, you'd explicitly have to plug it in and could physically unplug it later.

My first thought was wow! My second thought was, wait a minute...

The image certainly shows there are a lot of satellites floating around Earth. But "crowded" is a relative term. There are many, many miles of space between those satellites.

So what is the hack that keeps us from constantly taking our luxuries for granted? Just as with the traffic situation, how often do we find ourselves complaining about having to do the laundry or the dishes or vacuuming or even heating up something for dinner -- all fairly small and easy tasks thanks to the help of technology, which took much more time and labor in a previous generation?

Yes, it's true that the complaining pushes us to find ways to make our lives even easier. But in the meantime, why are we unable to sustain our enjoyment for what we've got? If we could just change our thinking on this and begin to appreciate the amazing place we've reached on a more regular basis, imagine how much happier we'd all be. But what's the hack to do that?

The batteries come with long warranties. Even early Honda Civic Hybrid models from 2005 had 8 year warranties and a lawsuit extended that to 9-10 years. Prius batteries are, anecdotally at least, lasting even longer. I would imagine there's a very good warranty on the Tesla batteries, given their track record of standing behind their product.

No -- An attitude of "someone on HN says 'vaccines may not always be safe'" is not real science.

Unless you want to provide any actual studies to back up your claim, you're just spouting the sort of pseudoscience that gets children killed.

While it's true that some very small percent of the population can have an allergic reaction to some vaccines, the risk of your child dying from, say, polio is much much higher than the risk of him/her dying from the vaccine.

Not sure why "for Men" matters. A better washing machine UI in general would probably be beneficial to anyone using it (assuming that the temperature and speed differences actually make a difference in the outcomes).

Thanks, it's helpful to consider it from that perspective -- at least as potential reasoning for why the bill was written in the first place.

But we can counter that it's specious to claim customers are clamoring for this but not getting anywhere with manufacturers. Apple's Find my Phone feature is already one step toward addressing this issue, and there are a handful of third-party apps on the market that do similar things. These market solutions will continue to get better over time if they're popular.

And of course, there's the question of why it's the manufacturers' responsibility to address theft in the first place. Jewelers aren't required to engrave and register all their necklaces.