chill1

Fixed headers consume vertical screen space -- permanently. Instead of allowing you to scroll down to have maximum vertical space for the content.

> "I'm not a Lawyer, but I do know how to search the USPTO Database for Prior Art. It's not rocket science, anyone can do it. If you are a founder, and you are worried, spend some time researching it."

You must be careful about doing research into patents yourself (as a founder or engineer). If it can be proven that you had prior knowledge of a patent, then you may be liable for treble damages.

> "For one, I refuse to subscribe to the idea that it's OK to run away from the problem and let patent trolls win by default."

Patent trolls "win" by extracting money from companies producing/doing actual things; see the recent Newegg case and many others. If you are thinking about creating a company or innovative product, and also decide to launch said company/product outside of the U.S., then you effectively deny them battle. You cannot lose a battle that you do not fight.

"He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious." - Sun Tzu

> "Are you further North than any other person who has given the same answers as you for the first 32 questions?"

What if one of the persons was not on the planet at the time?

Google trends rate limits you fairly quickly it seems. If you post a google trend graph, please post a link to a static image representation as well.

Well they do a lot of things [1], but they do outline the areas in which they are active.

[1] https://www.eff.org/work

For starters, we could all stop calling them car "accidents"... The language we use has a direct affect on the emotions we feel while talking about subjects such as this. Softening our language takes the humanity out of life. I refer you to George Carlin [1], who explained it better than I could.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h67k9eEw9AY

The best way to learn is to have a need to learn. What made you initially want to learn to code? Is it a business idea? An idea you had for an app or game?

There are many different types of programming; as well as many different levels.

Web programming isn't going away for a while, and it can be useful for doing quite a lot of things. I wrote a quick start guide for beginners like yourself [1] a while ago, that you might find useful.

I didn't even know HTML six years ago, and have been working full time in the industry for almost three years now. I started out trying to force a piece of forum software into being a community-based website. I quickly got into writing custom add-ons for that forum software. I just kept moving further and further up the food chain until I got to where I am today: being paid to build multiple, complex web applications.

The toughest part about learning something completely new is not knowing the right questions to ask. It can be insanely frustrating at times. But if you can stick with it, all the anguish, self-doubt, and sleepless nights will be worth it. If you really want something, you can do anything.

[1] https://degreesofzero.com/article/70

So I suppose you wouldn't mind if a new coal plant opened up a couple blocks from your home?

> ".. moral judgments can be viewed as nothing more than the expression of emotional attitudes.."

I sense that you hold an underlying assumption that morality cannot be attained through logic and reasoning.

Use mobile version to get around the pay-wall: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-...

I wanted to send you a quick note that I'd be willing to help, on the off chance that you did manage to get that open source project going with government cooperation.

Unfortunately, you do not have an email in your profile. And your website is throwing a 503 error.

True.. If someone who wasn't already an established freelancer / contractor in the IT field tried to do what he did, they'd certainly have a hard go of it. And, if they wanted to mirror the author's "reset", they would certainly have to think longer term than most people seem to be capable of; 2+ years minimum of pushing yourself to learn, gain experience in the field, and build a network of contacts.

"Life is like the best video game ever, it has amazing graphics, infinite amounts of levels, a huge map and this ridiculous great freedom. I just needed to pick up the controller."

> .. the last thing I still use is the search, which still feels light weight and easy to use.

If you haven't, you should really give DuckDuckGo [1] a shot. I used Google's search for the longest time, and finally just forced myself to switch to DDG this summer. It was rough for a while, but either I've gotten used to their search algorithm / results, or the results have gotten better. I hardly ever have to use Google's search to find anything anymore.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo

The Electrum Bitcoin Client doesn't download the blockchain. It uses remote servers to verify transactions. Useful if you need to be up and running quickly.

http://electrum.org/index.html

Perhaps structural changes in the way politicians are elected and retain office would have some positive long term effects. I imagine if it was possible to hold a direct-vote referendum on the current sitting president mid-term would hold their feet to the fire at least a little bit. Also, prohibiting advertising by political campaigns (TV, print, all of it) coupled with state-sponsored, mandetory debates between presidential candidates might force a real debate about real issues.

And assuming we agreed that those changes would be beneficial to the political system, how might we go about achieving those reforms?

> Nice false dilemma

I think you meant "false dichotomy" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy

I don't use Twilio, but this was an interesting write-up. After reading it, I can totally understand how important it is to have safe-guards and redundancies baked into user balance information. I like how they even mentioned (although a bit vaguely) how they plan to implement those additional protections [1].

[1] "We are now introducing robust fail-safes, so that if billing balances don’t exist or cannot be written, the system will not suspend accounts or charge credit cards. Finally, we will be updating the billing system to validate against our double-bookkeeping databases in real-time."

> ".. Twilio usage that resulted in a billing transaction (e.g. 1 cent for a SMS message or a phone call) triggered the billing system to attempt a recharge using the credit card associated with the customer’s account. This only affected accounts with auto-recharge enabled."

> "Consequently, the billing system charged customer credit cards to increase account balances without being able to update the balances themselves. This root cause produced the billing incident of customer credit cards being charged repeatedly."

Sounds like when an action required funds from a user's balance (which their system thought was 0), it attempted to recharge their balance by charging their credit card. And since the system also could not write to the database (to increase the balance) the balance remained at 0. Thus, the system kept thinking it had to recharge the balance again.

I've found that watching almost any form of news -- in the United States -- is a complete waste of time, and even a hinderince to my own personal happiness.

> I know that the money doesn't all go to the artists - what would you have me (or the GP) do instead, not pay for any of it?

Mail them a check. Mail them cash. Hand them cash in person. Send them bitcoins; if they're tech-savvy enough.

"You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin

What are you doing to make the world better? When's the last time you did anything that helped make things better? Yes, this might be a relatively easy, small thing to do, but at least it's something. Who knows? Maybe one of the representatives / senators actually notices and pauses for a moment and thinks. Stranger things have happened.

And it's "its".. "It's" is a conjunction. "Its" is possessive.

Summary of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Their Additional Protocols - http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m3...

Pretty sure there's something in there about destroying entire village(s) filled with people.

You can uncheck the box next to the gift options, so that you don't waste their time/money on sending you a gift.

I've been using Advanced REST Client [1] for quite a while now. Have not yet encountered anything about it that I don't like. That's usually a good sign of quality software -- to me at least.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-clie...

I've actually been using this to convert large PDF files to HTML to be displayed in-browser. It's for my work, so I don't feel comfortable posting a link to the demo instance here.

It is definitely the best solution I've found so far. The outputted HTML / CSS / images look almost identical to the source PDF. That being said, there are a few issues still:

* One Gigantic (600kb) CSS file from a single PDF

* Hundreds of individual fonts

* HTML semantics are non-existent

These are all relatively easy to fix, I believe. I have found my own solutions to most of the issues in post-processing.

Kudos to you, coolwanglu. Also, I'd like to get in touch with you about lending a hand to fix some of the issues I've encountered.

Thanks for a cool piece of software!

The point of unique salts is that even if all the user's passwords are the same, the end resulting hashes that are stored in the database, are different. So, let's say you wanted to hash your set of 50,000 different, commonly used passwords. You'd have to hash that list of 50k passwords for EACH individual user. So instead of 50,000 hashes... you have 50,000 x the total number of users.

Czech Republic is a real place, filled with nice people. They don't deserve to be threatened by ignorant Americans who probably can't even find Rhode Island on a map.