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codva

353 karma · joined July 11, 2010

Sales Engineer for a web strategy and design firm. http://odonnellweb.com
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codva··on Twitter Sees 6% Increase in “Like” Activity After First Week of Hearts
I clicked a few just to see the animation. If a lot of people did that there is your 6%.
codva··on Pandora Acquires TicketFly for $450M
One cool thing Pandora might be able to do is analyze their stream data and predict where bands will have enough fans to make money on a live show. I could imagine TicketFly offering a service that essentially tells bands where to play, and of course steer them to a Ticketfly venue whenever possible.
codva··on Zachflower/resume-server
I can't think of any reason this really needs to exist - but it's damn cool anyway.
codva··on Commuting Kills
When I said I wanted to be in the 1% I wasn't talking about commuting times.

90 minutes in, 2 hours coming home most days. Only saving grace is that I'm not driving for most of it.

codva··on Show HN: Bear CMS – A new, much better way to build websites
So the CMS is hosted in your cloud, and the website itself is hosted where ever we want? Am I understand this correctly?

Not sure I understand the advantage of this approach. It's interesting, but at the end of the day everything is still in the cloud, and the sites are only secure as the security on your cloud environment.

codva··on A week without Google
Trading Google for Yahoo is just trading one company trying to track you around the web for another company doing the exact same thing.
codva··on Ask HN: I want to create tech blog – what should I blog about?
If you aren't deeply passionate about the subject you will get bored quickly writing about the same general subject every day.

So blog about whatever you are passionate about. It's really the only way you have a chance of sticking with it long enough to get any traction.

codva··on What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school?
The cook at the frat house went home after putting lunch out on Friday, and didn't come back until Monday morning. However we had a rule that the kitchen had to be stocked with bread, cheese, butter and Cinnamon toast shakers at all times. You can go all weekend eating grilled cheese and cinnamon toast sandwiches.I did it a few times, at least.
codva··on What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school?
Purdue graduate here, and I think that's a fair assessment. The rich kids seemed to be Management majors. They just needed a degree so that they could take over Daddy's company when he retired in a few years.
codva··on Show HN: Find email addresses of people you want to contact
Seems like a solution in search of a problem. Finding email addresses is not hard. It's pretty easy to guess the corporate email address of anybody working for a US based company. Simply use Google to figure out the corporate pattern for email, and apply to the person you want to reach. When in doubt, simply guessing variants of the usual patterns will usually work within 5 minutes. There are also tools like jigsaw.com and LinkedIn.
codva··on Editor’s note: Reader comments in the age of social media
I just have a dorky personal blog, but the comments moved from the blog to Facebook on their own. I didn't do anything different, but my friends sort of decided they preferred to discuss the blog posts on Facebook. I didn't see any reason to fight it. It's not like I have ad revenue on the line.
codva··on Ask HN: Dealing with Failed Interview at Google and AWS?
I had three phone interviews with AWS, then they flew me to Seattle for 7 more interviews in one day.

I didn't get an offer.

There is a large randomness factor in interviews. You could have come in second to somebody who is basically your equal, but happens to have the same undergrad school as the hiring manager. You just don't know, and you never will.

codva··on How do you communicate if you won't hit an estimate?
It starts way before you are running over budget. Your entire sales and contracting process needs to reinforce the idea that there are no fixed cost estimates prior to the completion of the discovery process and sign off by the client on the wireframes and/or software specification document.

Granted, 90% of clients don't really work that way. In which case you need to gauge your comfort level with getting them to buy in, or in some cases, you simply have to walk away from the client that has a one page overview of a complex web site and wants a fixed cost, binding bid.

codva··on Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds
Neocities did something similar a couple of years ago - with more of a Geocities focus (obviously!) My Neocities page - https://chrisod.neocities.org/
codva··on Heathkit
My AM/FM Heathkit radio worked the first time I powered it up. One of my proudest moments in junior high.
codva··on VIZIO $999 50-inch 4k TV
And I paid about $2000 in 2003 for a 53" rear projection High def TV. It's still going strong though.
codva··on Apple Plans to Shut Down Beats Music?
Count me among the apparent minority that still wants to own my music. I only own about 400 albums and way too many of those get ignored for months, if not a year+, at a time. Streaming just gives me even more choices that I don't really need.
codva··on A History of Misses for RadioShack
RS kind of was the original maker space. They could take that market back.
codva··on The Simple Technology That Accidentally Ruined Baseball
A well played 1-0 baseball game that takes 2 hours to complete is an absolute joy to watch. A 1-0 game that lasts 3:30, not so much.

It's not the score or HRs or or the hits, it is the length of the game that is ruining baseball. Get the games back to 2 - 2.5 hours and it will be fine.

codva··on The White House Gives Up on Making Coders Dress Like Adults
I was in the Social media office of the White House a couple of months ago. It's in the Old Executive Building, not the West Wing. The office was decorated like you would expect a social media office to be decorated, the people all acted like you would expect, but they were all wearing suits.

It was a little weird.

codva··on How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos
I think the lesson here is not that the cloud is bad, it's that a sync service is not a backup. I use Dropbox to share, I use Amazon S3 to backup.
codva··on Technorati Quietly Killed Its Once Authoritative Blog Ranking System in May
I thought it died years ago - had no idea that it was still a live service.
codva··on SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization
As one of the few full-time sales people that hang out on HN...

Business to business sales (which is the usual code for high volume cold calling jobs) is a slog. It takes a certain kind of person to do it. I've done it, but never really liked it. I'm more of an enterprise sales guy for start ups. Maybe the variety of different pitches every week is a selling point for potential staff? I really don't know. I do now that you couldn't pay me enough to do the job :)

Outsourced cold calling (phone) is a pretty major industry in the enterprise space. It'll be interesting to see if this scales down to a feet on the street model.

codva··on When Excite nearly bought Google
I remember when Excite reviewed my website back in 1997. I thought I had won the Internet :) IIRC, they gave me 2.5 whatever their icon was called, excites?
codva··on Facebook: Do not release your new app feature that listens to users
I uninstalled the facebook app from my phone last week. It works just fine in the phone's browser.
codva··on Parenting Rewires the Male Brain
This doesn't surprise me at all. I was sure I was going to be horrible at parenting. I was scared right up to the second I held my son for the first time, when everything just clicked. I don't know how else to describe it. I went from terrified to "I was born to do this" in about one second.
codva··on Facebook wants to 'listen' to your music and TV
So what happens when the MPAA buys access to the data and cross references everybody that is watching Game of Thrones with the HBO subscriber list?
codva··on The Absurdity of LinkedIn
I think it's sometimes easier to click on a couple of endorsements just to get the damn box to go away. I'm pretty sure many of my endorsements come that way.
codva··on Shutting down Ubuntu One file services
I often found that music on their music service was a buck an album cheaper than Amazon.
codva··on The function of zebra stripes
The explanation I heard as a kid was that the stripes confused predators. When they stand in a group the stripes allegedly make it hard for predators to attack from the rear.
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