jakejake

Really interesting story. I wonder if I myself might have gotten into trouble were it not for the fact that I couldn't make that many phone calls. I seem to recall that there was no such thing as unlimited calling - even for local numbers. Not to mention I wasn't allowed to hog our one phone line. Calling a long-distance number for 30 minutes probably would have resulted in at least a $10 phone bill - which was totally out of the question.

I was resigned to call one local BBS and do a direct 1-to-1 modem connection with my only other friend who had a modem!

Wow that sounds like a bad client!

I have a few reasonably popular Wordpress plugin, maybe around 500k installs. I get offers all the time from people wanting me to build them something for $25.

If you use Wordpress to find clients, it's tough to find good paying work. But if you find clients elsewhere, then you can use Wordpress as a part of your overall solution and save time.

Possibly the greatest use of iOSs new web filtering API. Excellent work.

Aside from a few bitcoin I bought before it exploded, I have had an uncanny ability to buy and sell bitcoin at exactly the wrong times. If you want to make a lot of money with bitcoins, my advice is to look at what I do and then do the exact opposite!

Footage shot in logarithmic color space looks extremely dull and grey until you apply a LUT (lookup table) to it. I'm not sure if it's exactly what the Author is doing, but it is interesting to me when you see footage that almost appears black & white. Then just applying some magical math to it, all of these vivid colors pop out!

I think a 5 year old with no preconceived notions of a user interface is probably the best validation of whether a device is "usable." Also my 93 year old grandmother took to her iPhone almost instantaneously. As did my technically challenged parents, all of their friends and pretty much any of the hundreds of people who I have ever seen pick up an iPhone. I have actually never even heard of a single person picking up and iPhone and saying "I can't figure this out - it's unusable!" until your post. And on a tech forum no less - what are you even doing here?

Perhaps you feel Apple should have designed a beautiful rotary phone?

If you put an iPhone in any 5-year olds hand they seem to have no trouble figuring it out.

I feel like Apple actually does offer good privacy features on their devices. Of course watching one's parents just click OK on everything to make the alert dialog go away, makes you realize that the device makers can only do so much.

The most interesting part of this to me was that fact that players tend to use their birth year in their username. And that the number 88 was a statistical outlier because for some reason people must really like that number.

There is a history of these types of crowd-sourced-product-creation companies going under. I personally think the reason is because it is relatively easy to build a product. But it is incredibly difficult to build a business around a product. It is very difficult to get traction and you have to really focus on and refine your product. So you have a startup who's concept is to crank out product after product, and then just throw them into the wind, hoping something will take off. Even businesses with one amazing product don't take off that way. A huge corporation can afford an R&D lab where 1 out of 1000 products might take off. (You might even say ycombinator is such a concept) A startup with a little bit of funding cannot afford to crank out dud after dud. They're betting that they will hit the jackpot after, say, 5 or 10 products, depending on the amount of runway they have.

Then again, there's a lot of businesses that were successful because they found the magic sauce that all of their predecessors were unable to find. If you think you've found it, then definitely go for it! If you think your concept is pretty much a rehash of Assembly, then I would probably start thinking seriously about how you are going to succeed where they failed.

Probably more sensible and simple would just be a warning alert that pops up when launching an app with a certificate that will expire within X days.

I suspect that there's also a phase of life factor too. People tend to chill out when they get older. Especially those that are successful enough to where they have a comfortable life. Generally you start getting awards and such when your career is pretty well established.

Meh, Apple wants to control everything because they want a seamless, dead-simple device for non-techies. Because that's the majority of customers - not the power users who want to get down to the bare metal of their machine. They are tyrannical about protecting that experience and basically not allowing you to screw up your device no matter how hard you try.

Of course they're making a ton of money on the App Store as well, but I still think it's more about protecting the device. Otherwise they'd just approve every app and collect their commissions.

At the time, Jobs was showing off how developers could create app-like experiences using HTML - with the ability for people to "install" your app using the add-to-home-screen feature. That was the intended solution for us plebs. Native apps were most likely going to be only for partner companies.

Ironically when people starting creating actual apps using HTML via PhoneGap and the like, Apple was resistant to that too!

You could say that Google is constantly under a DDoS attack because the amount of normal traffic they get far exceeds the amount that would constitute an attack for an average business site.

hehe, i lived for a short time in Arlington Heights, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Chicago is not exactly rural. And don't try to tell me you're in Chicago if you work in the burbs. You're in Oak Brook, man, that's not Chicago!

My company has spent weeks agonizing over price changes and different features for different subscription levels (including a free level). We run all kinds of numbers and projections but at the end of the day you don't always know for sure until you flip the switch. You can do all kinds of surveys and talk to your customers. But you just don't know exactly how may people are going downgrade, upgrade, sign up, or even care about your changes.

The author was certainly a victim of their own success, as their conversion rates are pretty good. They just need to find limitations for the free account that doesn't consumer more resources than they can support.

For me this is one of those things that I would definitely spend $800/hour on! Not to mention that the drugs they use to put you under are amazing.

Ironically I had my 4 wisdom teeth pulled without it - wasn't even offered to me at the time. I only had the anesthesia once for a minor dental procedure.

It is tough for sure. People who take a hard-line opinion on the subject I think may not have worked at a small company and/or have never had to think about payroll and insurance expenses.

I know when I was younger it never even occurred to me to wonder where my paycheck came from.

Anybody who walks in pushing some personal agenda tends to be a bit of a red flag. The article doesn't really take that into account.

It's a shame because it would be interesting to know how it would have turned out had they not wore the hats. Or maybe the control group could have taken a year off to go skydiving on the resume and worn a hat that said "I love skydiving"

Well, I was in a situation where my small company had two people and I needed another programmer. One applicant came in who was clearly older - in his 60s I would guess. He came to the interview with a walker and looked in very bad health.

I really didn't care the age of who I hired but my company was tiny and it was a struggle for me to pay a good salary and provide insurance (both of which I did). I was not looking to take advantage of anybody. However if somebody came on and went on extended medical leave, I wouldn't have been able to keep paying them - not out of personal greed but because there literally would not be money to pay them. My salary was not much, if any more than my employees. Possible I might have had some legal obligation to keep providing some type of insurance - I'm not sure.

As it turns out he was completely unqualified - his resume did not jive at all with his knowledge - so I did not have to face the dilemma of whether I would hire him vs a younger, healthier applicant. But it did make me think and appreciate both sides of the situation.

That's a tragic story. I certainly don't think it's anybody's business why you need a second job. Ultimately why do we need any job? Money of course. What you do with that money is your own business.

Certainly people cook less these days but if you get out of the young, hip, affluent areas of town to where the majority of people actually live - it doesn't seem very likely that home cooking is going anywhere.

I agree that some terminology could make it easier. I think "key" is an ok choice for the private key, but for the public key I think there could be a better analogy. Calling them the same thing is a bit confusing and people don't understand that one of them you give away, while the other is confidential.

When I explain it to people I tell them that their public key is like an unlocked lockbox that you give people into which they can put a private message. They can close the box to lock it, but once they shut the box only you have the key to open it.

It's not a great analogy but it seems to me that the public key does not make sense as a "key" to the average person.

When it was first announced there was huge hype here on HN. I myself signed up. We were all really hoping that somebody had finally solved the cross-platform development pain. I was excited to see what the platform was going to do because at my company we really do feel the pain of developing for multiple platforms. So the investment isn't a surprise to me considering a CEO with a previous exit success and all the hype.

When they launched, though, it was just lackluster and had some major rendering bugs. It felt like the air got let out of the tires and everybody just moved on. So looking at it now, it's definitely difficult to see what all the hype was about.

Same thing happened to me. I wonder if I'll get my image ? Wait time is 300 hours so it'll be a while.

Putting on my trusting hat, I would think that MS is only transmitting enough data to keep the machine running and virus free without any intervention from the non-technical people. So it would be a safe machine for a small company without any IT staff. A lot of those companies just take the computer out of the box and plug it in and don't do anything further anyway.

I don't see why they don't just add the option to disable that with appropriate labeling, though, if nothing else to satisfy the more vocal, privacy-concerned folks.

Maybe you should keep your enlightened racist attitude to yourself.