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This is my favorite page of infrequently asked questions. It's for an outdoor concert hall. Scroll down to see some of the odd questions:

"My father is hard of hearing and although I tell him your system amplifies sound sufficiently for him to hear, he's still afraid he won't hear what's going on. Do you have anything else that can help him out?"

and

"My mother used to perform at Cain Park in the 1930s-50s and hasn't been back since. She'd love to see a show there now, but she's in a wheelchair and doesn't think it would work out, getting her in and out. Is she correct?"

http://www.cainpark.com/facts_faq.asp

Would it be enough to allow the browser to arbitrarily style visited links that occur within the same domain of the current page and force these restricted rules on links outside the domain? Although I don't typically do much with visited links, it seems pretty extreme to limit them so much.

Edit: Nevermind, I forgot that the URL destination can be changed. I guess the browser could force style changes to the links if href is changed, but that might be too complicated. It just seems like there should be a more elegant way to fix the problem than restricting what styles can be set for visited links.

That hasn't been my experience. Maybe it's not a smooth as an iPhone, but it works well enough for me.

I've got a makeshift standing desk like that also. My plan is to replace the boxes and books with small shelves made of plywood. Shouldn't be to hard and will only cost a few bucks.

An oldie but goodie is from Think and Grow Rich:

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Napoleon-Hill/dp/04492...

Develop one Definitive Chief Aim. It's a very specific medium to long-term goal (1 - 20 years or so) with a specific deadline. Repeat it to yourself every day. Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Don't bother with intermediate goals that you aren't fully passionate about. Spend the time to determine what is truly important to you and focus on that. It worked for Bruce Lee:

My Chief Personal Aim In Life:

I, Bruce Lee, will be the highest paid Oriental superstar in the United States. In return I will give the most exciting performances and render the best of quality in the capacity of an actor. Starting in 1970, I will achieve world fame and from then onward till the end of 1980 I will have in my possession the sum of $10,000,000—then I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness.

Bruce Lee 1969

http://www.martialdevelopment.com/blog/think-grow-rich-or-di...

I just read the book last fall so I obviously haven't achieved my goal yet, but I have until December 31st, 2014 to get there.

Also, for another method, Randy Pausch in his Time Management lecture (a really good lecture) said that he always knew what needed to get done that day, that week, and that semester. So that might be a good way to set incremental goals.

Well, that does seem out of the ordinary for a normal website. Then whatever you feel comfortable doing is probably the best thing. Keep it going, make it a read-only archive, sell it, or just delete the whole thing completely. You're probably the only one who can really decide.

I just improvised a standing desk this past weekend with boxes and books, and I'm enjoying it so far. Better posture already at least.

Closing permanently seems like an extreme thing to do. If you've done all that you can do, then I don't see why you would feel bad about abuse on sites that you can't control.

Another slightly less extreme option could be to start over clean. Delete all user accounts and ban any IPs from users who have ever accessed your site from creating a new account. That way you don't have to close it down permanently.

Overall, I'm getting the impression that you feel personally guilty and responsible for the abuse against your users on other sites and are looking for validation from HN that it's okay to shut it down and move on. Maybe you should freeze new accounts and freeze forum posting for a month and see if you feel differently after some time has passed. That would also give your users time to cool off.

If it's time-consuming to run the site, then tell your users that you need a few select people to step up and act as moderators, otherwise the community will be shut down. If no one cares enough to moderate, then go ahead and shut it down. If they do care enough to moderate then write some basic tools to give them control to monitor abusive behavior.

No URL shorteners please! http://terms-of-service-generator.legalriver.com/

Your post in the forums doesn't really mention spammers, but abusive users:

"PBH has run for over 10 years as a great place to get and share information about Colombia. Unfortunately, during the last few years, there has been a (very) small minority of people who thought it was ok to personally attack, threaten and harass, both on phb, on other websites and in real life, other members that they disagree with. You know who you are. "

It sounds like a different problem than just throwing up a captcha. Have you banned the users/IPs of the offending people? Can't you just add a "report user" button by each post and then have users or IPs with X number of reports automatically banned?

Do you have any high-end premium features? Or are users and questions the only knobs you have turn?

It sounds like a good idea, but with that name I just couldn't help but think of this: http://scrubs.wikia.com/wiki/Brain_Trust

The article says "He graduated from Stanford University Online High School at age 11, and soon after enrolled full-time at UConn." Did you go to the online high school also? If so, what is that like?

I wonder if it works the other way around.

It doesn't really matter what proof you have. If your employer is suspicious and takes you to court, you've already lost. If you have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on legal fees in order to prove your point, then I guess this advice doesn't apply to you.

Talk to a lawyer familiar with those issues in your state. It depends on what he signed and your state's laws. No matter what, it's still best to disclose it to his employer, just like this article suggests and patio11 also suggests: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin...

I bet they have more happy users.

It wasn't a lot of people. That was one eye tracking study from one user.

Those are good points, but just below the pictures he states an important result from his study:

"I picked examples where users scrolled more or less all the way down — often there's no viewing of the bottom because users don't scroll that far."

I don't know exactly how frequently "often" is, but I think those examples were just to show what happens when people actually do scroll down. He's suggesting that most of the time they don't.

If they make a ton of money, then it might encourage competition. If they don't make any money, then it might be embarrassing.

Yeah, I think other forums might be better suited for talking about blogging in general. Here are previous discussions about blogging platforms on HN:

http://www.google.com/search?q=blogging+platform+site:news.y...

For my two cents, I've been using Wordpress a lot, but I'm currently working on switching to custom blog software because of the continuous security problems with Wordpress.

I'm not the OP, but I'd recommend reading Founders At Work. I can't remember any specific examples, but I'm pretty sure that there's a mix of both self-taught and traditional CS founders who have been successful.

I would just like to say thanks for being honest and up front. There are so many examples of non-technical people being demanding and unappreciative of programmers, that it's refreshing to see you have an open attitude about this. It's much more pleasant than hearing requests like "I need a programmer to build my social networking site for $100!"

I've wasted a lot of time on this kind of analysis for picking brackets. I estimated that the odds of a person picking a perfect bracket are 1 in 924 trillion: http://www.codeswimming.com/blog/2008/03/the-perfect-ncaa-br...

If you want a shortcut to estimate win probability instead of looking it up in a chart:

Prob Team 1 winning = Rank Team 2 / (Rank Team 1 + Rank Team 2)

That formula only breaks down at 1 vs. 16 and 1 vs. 2.

It's fun to postulate, but it won't really help in picking your bracket. What I do is look for teams highly rated by Sagarin or kenpom, but underrated by seeding. I have Wisconsin winning the whole thing in my bracket. You've gotta maximize the probability of occurance while also minimizing redundant picks with the rest of the pool. However, I've never done especially well in practice and regularly get beat by people who choose by jersey color. It's still fun though.

I agree with all of these, and I personally would say that the most important ones are version control and OOP. They're two that I put off for a while as a self-taught programmer, but have paid off the most.

I started with PHP, which lulls you into thinking that procedural programming is all you'll ever need. For larger and more complex code bases though, OOP really makes things more organized.

Baby boomers are starting to retire. That's a large demographic that isn't good with computers. Maybe find an industry that caters to them where technology can help. It doesn't sound like fun to me, but where there's muck there's brass.

Also, you may not have to be "passionate" about the domain, but you've got to at least tolerate it since you'll need to spend a lot of time doing it.

Come to Cleveland! It's cheap, and no beaches or sun will guarantee that you'll be indoors coding all day :)

I don't think shared hosting has the "home-run" type upside that he's looking for.

Wow, thanks for the list. That's more features than I have time to add though. For some of the bigger items like the whiteboard, I'm hoping people can use other services in the mean time. Some of those items are being worked on now though.

Thanks, those are great points. Spam hasn't been an issue so far, which is good. I'm working on a couple of those things already. I'm not sure if it's busy enough yet to generate an active IRC channel for each class, but people are always free to set one up on their own and post the info