balloot

What's your point? Nobody here is arguing that the client should be able to not pay for services rendered.

and how do you know the client didn't pay?

So you think the contract designer now owns nycfreshmarket.com and the contents of the site unless its demands are met?

I would love to see a single case ever where a company's domain and website were turned over to a contract designer due to a pay dispute.

So you think onemine.com, and not NYC Fresh Market, has IP rights to nycfreshmarket.com and its website contents, simply because onemine.com was hired as a contract designer?

I would LOVE to see a legal precedent for this claim.

Actually, nobody knows anything except that onemine.com is willing to hijack the websites of its clients. Everything else is you simply accepting their side of the story without question.

Why are you assuming the client didn't pay? You know absolutely nothing except that the designer ripped down the website and replaced it with a nastygram. Given that information, I'm certainly not quick to rule out the possibility that designer may be the asshole here.

Or in your mechanic example, maybe that mechanic quoted me $500, and then I show up and he asks for $1500 instead. I don't want to pay $1000 extra, so he threatens to spray paint my car with "balloot is a cheapskate" and park it out front of his shop.

How do you have any idea this isn't what onemine.com isn't doing to the grocery store?

I can't believe people are defending this. If a brick-and-mortar store has a pay dispute with a contractor, would that contractor have the right to put a giant padlock on the store doors and spray paint a message on the door saying that the store owner didn't pay? Obviously not. How is this any different?

The key thing to keep in mind is the designer may be wrong. I'm sure if you ask the store owner they have a totally different story, and it's likely not "We are SUPER EVIL and just stiff people who do good work". Maybe the contractor (onemine.com, if you're curious) tried to bill the store owner more than agreed upon, the store owner refused, and this is the result. Maybe the contractor left out some significant part of the site and the store owner wont pay until completion. Who knows?

The problem here is OneMine has taken all the power in the pay dispute by holding the client's intellectual property hostage until all demands are met. It's at the very least unprofessional, but it becomes defamation very quickly unless OneMine has an absolutely airtight case. There better be exactly zero unfinished products, missed deadlines, rate changes, etc. And it's safe to say with many contract projects this is not the case.

Instead of being "stiffed", it is far more likely there is some degree of nuance. I'm sure if you called the market they would give their side of the story, and it would be something different than "we just took his services and didn't pay".

The problem here is the dispute that's occurring is being settled through taking the client's website hostage. That's ridiculously unprofessional.

Having a proper contract is the responsibility of the contractor. If he didn't bother to present one, he doesn't get to make up for it by holding the website hostage.

Not quite sure how you came to that conclusion when the first two sentences of the post are "This is going be a bullet FAQ on starting a business. No joke."

This is way too narrow in general, and a number of the points are just wrong. He spends a lot of points talking about "clients" and "revenue" like every successful company has those right off the bat.

My absolute favorite is the irony of #21 (Should I focus on SEO? No), when this post was originally published on Quora.

You're using a terrible example. There is exactly one city in Arkansas with greater than 100k people, and that is Little Rock with 193k. That state has zero claim to being "a cross section of what makes up the US".

I typed in 3 large US cities and got 3 "no results found". Google map API is your friend.

3. Get a job at another company that doesn't hire via silly hazing rituals. Preferably one that isn't past its heyday like the two you mentioned.

I don't know what it is about technical interview-style code puzzles, but I have always been terrible at them. Every time I go through a job hunt, I end up with at least one fabulous flameout where I just can't do something that would normally be very simple for me. It sucks. I have fantastic experience, good references, a degree from a top university, but you put me in a room with someone looking over my shoulder as I write code and I just turn into mush often enough that it makes passing a many round technical interview a statistical improbability.

The good news is that more and more companies (and especially the small ones that I like to work for) do the coding sample/test code thing. And every time I get one of those I absolutely crush it. I've never once been denied an offer when asked to write an offline code sample - and the offers have been from a number of the top startups in the game.

What does any of this mean? Well, in the last two companies I worked with I ended up rising to be the top technical person on my team. I've never had any kind of negative review of any sort. And in the last round this happened after I was denied an offer from two different companies because I couldn't code.

So I guess I'm that guy. I've been rejected from Google 3 different times because they keep begging me to interview based off my experience/internal recommendations, and then I interview and their interview/hazing process weeds me out. It would be nice if they woke up and realized that process isn't an effective filter, but I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime there's plenty of companies who will happily hire me after they see me do work that's actually relevant to the job. And when I interview people for my team I steer clear of trying to stump them under intense pressure, and instead ask for a mini project. I guess it doesn't feed the ego quite like breaking someone with a super awesome whiteboard question, but screening candidates more effectively makes up for that.

Same here. Was expecting some cool canvas demo. This is fine, but a lack of zoom out makes it decidedly less useful than other maps out there.

I would love to meet this mythical being who understands functional programming but has no clue how to write an imperative program.

I would love to see this! One of the fundamental issues I have with functional languages is every example I see is basically "See this thing that's relatively simple and uncomplicated in Ruby/PHP/C/whatever? Here's how to do that in Haskell!" And the Haskell version ends up being extremely unintuitive and complicated. Bottom line is I still don't know for which situations functional languages are a "good" tool.

I know a bit about Haskell and have played with it. I guess it just seems like functional languages are for those who want to solve super complicated mental exercises when doing tasks that would otherwise be easy using a traditional language.

There are very few things in the world of CS/programming where I can't follow along and grok what's going on, especially when laid out in a tutorial form like this. The fact that I was totally lost when reading this is not a good sign when you're trying to get people to adopt your school of thought.

Yikes. That might as well be titled "Why functional languages will never catch on." It took something dead simple (a function that adds 3), and made it insanely complicated. Why would anyone choose to deal with that?

1) You clearly don't work at a fairly liberal company. 2) I disagree with the "regardless of context". Let's say someone did see you reading this. You would say "this is the top ranked item on Hacker News. Didn't realize one of the drawings was naked." And that would be that, at least everywhere I've ever worked.

In a totally and completely unrelated fact, the rate of gun ownership is also down 30% since the 1980's. It's almost as if the two may have a relationship, but that certainly cannot be the case because the NRA has spent a jillion dollars telling me otherwise!

I despise interviewing for software positions. Engineers love to treat interviews like some kind of hazing. They're gonna make you quiver and sweat and if you can still solve their stupid brainteaser maybe they'll give you the honor of working with them. Problem being, this has basically nothing to do with how good you'll be at the job. I spend 0% of a normal day with someone I don't know staring me down and judging every line of code I write in realtime.

I much prefer medium sized offline coding challenges, both for myself and for hiring my team. You give a good engineer a small project to work on, an he should crush it. Because that actually has something to do with what engineers do on a day to day basis. Personally, I get the job pretty much every time if I am told to build a small project, and I crash and burn almost every time if I get the SWAT team of surly technical interviewers.

It's worked fine for me because the small companies I like to work for are more apt to give out the projects, but still I could do without some of the awkward interviews I've gone through with companies who use the Google-like process.

Totally. The market, and a dozen or two dead people, typically sorts this stuff out. So what's the problem?

Hearing Republicans hyperventilate about Solyndra et al drives me up a wall. Private VC firms invest all the time in companies that fail, but somehow the government is supposed to have a 100% success rate in its VC investments? Please spare us your concern.

Your problem is you are confusing skepticism for fear.

Evolution has given us a brain that is so complex that we still have very little understanding of how it actually functions. So do I believe that a drug company came up with a way to improve upon evolution and make the brain better? No, I do not. And I think that's a pretty reasonable initial stance to take given the facts at hand.

You're missing his point, which is a reasonable one. If the human body truly functioned better with modafinil, then evolution would have given us humans that naturally produced modafinil. That isn't the case, so the assumption is there is some downside to the drug, and one that actually outweighs the positives. However, the article makes modafinil seems like an obviously positive thing and that taking the pill fixes some bug in natural human behavior.

This article only scratches the surface of why most brilliant lower-middle class kids can't get into an Ivy. Just look at what's expected:

- lots of extracurriculars

Rich kid: spent the summer spoon feeding starving children in Honduras

Poor kid: works during the summer at the mall to make some money, and has never left the country.

Rich kid: joined a dance troupe, plays two sports at varsity level

Poor kid: Doesn't live within 50 miles of a dance studio and can't afford the extensive travel/coaching/equipment needed to excel in a bunch of sports

Rich kid: Fluent in Spanish due to private language tutor and aforementioned trip to Honduras

Poor kid: Never was even formally taught English grammar (most public schools don't anymore)

- lots of AP classes

Rich kid: Got a 5 on 7 different AP tests.

Poor kid: Goes to a school that doesn't offer AP classes at all.

- testing

Rich kid: Took an extensive SAT prep class, then took SAT 3 times and ACT 2 times and uses the best score

Poor kid: Didn't take a prep class and just took the SAT once

- connections

Rich kid: has a parent who went to an Ivy League school, or has a family friend who is an alum/Important Person who can write a letter of rec

Poor kid: Doesn't know a single person who went to an Ivy League school. Gets letters of rec from teachers

Pretty much every step in the admission process is designed to favor the haves over the have nots. There's a lot of things selective schools could do to make the process fairer without too much effort, but it's reasonable to assume that the deck isn't stacked by accident.

I resolve merge conflicts as well. Every system I've ever used gives you one file with delineated chunks (<<<<, === >>>). Never once have I said "this is too difficult - I need three windows open." And even if I did say that sometimes, I can't imagine optimizing the character width of my code for that one use case.

So why not make it 60 characters? Then you could have 4 files side by side!

But seriously - I guess there is some workflow where you would like to have 3 files side by side, but I certainly have never felt like that is something I need. I would much rather have readable, verbose variable names, which I have found to be the first thing to get axed in an 80 char column setup.